


with the road laid before our feet

by ninemoons42



Series: just as long as you stand by me [1]
Category: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X & Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bargaining, Body Worship, Boss Fight, Canon Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Chocobos, Coronations, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dating, Death Rituals, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Female Friendship, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Heterosexual Sex, Hot Springs & Onsen, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Major Character Injury, Male-Female Friendship, Marriage Proposal, Minor Gladiolus Amicitia/Ignis Scientia, Noctis and Noctis have a conversation, Noctis convenes her council of war, Noctis is no diplomat she just knows what she wants, Noctis learns about Prompto's backstory, Noctis performs a sending, Non-Linear Narrative, Outdoor Sex, Prayer, Princess Noctis Lucis Caelum, Prompto has weird ideas about dates, Rescue Missions, Self-Indulgent, Sex in a Car, Women Being Awesome, Young Love, a meeting of two Noctises, and this Noctis keeps her agency and her powers and she has a different destiny in mind, but they're both of an age and they're definitely consenting, characters save the world at even younger ages, deal with the gods, fortunately Noctis likes his weird ideas, fusion of FFXV and FFX, let's face it Noctis is the only thing different in this world, nineteen is pretty much age of majority in these worlds, objective get back Ravus!, so what happens if Noctis is a girl and a different kind of summoner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-09 17:16:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 56,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12280944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Crown Princess Noctis Lastella Lucis Caelum embarks on the great task of her life, at the behest of the Astrals, and at the command of her ailing father, King Regis Lucis Caelum XIII.She gathers her friends, drives the Regalia, learns how to become a Summoner, and decides to tell her very destiny to go screw itself.She's determined to change the world, and she's willing to give her life if it means she'll succeed.





	1. hymn of the evening

**Author's Note:**

> That non-regular tag is the one that says it all, really: this is FFXV with a female Noctis, but this is an FFXV that is also FFX, with the Summoner's Pilgrimage and the fight against the gods.
> 
> Quick reference for Noctis Lastella's outfit: [CLICK](https://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/post/166358624111/sketches-by-well-by-me-its-been-a-long-long).

“Give me that -- please?”

The man in the starched shirt that stretched over his paunch blinked, and for a moment Noctis felt nothing but dread at the recognition that dawned in his eyes -- surely, now, she’d be dragged out from her little corner of the public square, half-cowering in her alcove. Surely, now, she’d be urged back to the crowd that would stare at her, that would smile by showing all their teeth at her, and she would have to be stiff and proud and proper and she would not be allowed to show her emotions to anyone at all.

Helplessly, now, she stretched her gloved hand out for the man’s tray of little baked tarts.

And just when she thought he would raise the alert, he glanced quickly over his shoulder and, finding all eyes pinned on the entertainment going on in the center of the square -- a woman in white and purple, dancing gracefully with the long sashes that trailed from her wrists and from her ankles -- he thrust the tray at her, and dropped a frightened bow, and scurried away.

That was almost as good as being discovered: it was only a matter of time before that man talked about discovering the Crown Princess of Lucis, secreting herself in a corner to gorge on sweets.

So even though she wanted to eat all the tarts on the tray, she made herself eat only three, and she ate them as slowly as she dared: rich melting cheese beneath golden-singed sugar, and the crunch of the flaky pastry.

It still didn’t compare to all the attempts that Ignis had made at the dessert that she could only remember in a half-haze, from when she was a little girl.

Footsteps halted at a respectful distance, just as she was licking her fingertips clean of the last crumbs of the last tart. 

“Your Highness,” said a voice, a quiet and familiar voice.

There were moments when Noctis could only feel relief at hearing the voices of her -- who were they to her anyway? Formally, they were her Crownsguard, and at some point they would probably be her Queen’s Swords. 

But in many ways they were also her friends, and in far too many ways, they weren’t just the men who stood between her and the world, whether before her or behind her or -- where she preferred them to stand -- with her.

That meant that they could not be completely detached from her, as she could not be completely separated from them.

So the presence of this familiar woman -- Crowe Altius of her father’s personal bodyguard -- was a jolt, and a reminder. Not entirely an unwelcome one, though Noctis could never get over the near-compulsion to look herself over, to make sure she was presentable. Not just to her father, and not just to his advisers, but to everyone who was in some way or another associated with Regis Lucis Caelum CXIII.

After all, she was Regis’s only child, and she was his heir, and how she looked and how she carried herself were perceived to be a direct reflection onto him.

But if it was Crowe, then maybe she could just -- be who she was in the moment, without fear, even though fear was the thing with the dull teeth that gnawed at her insides.

And if it was Crowe, then maybe it was all right for her to just reach out and take what the woman was offering: a small white towel wrapped in a protective film, with beads of scented water creating a pretty pattern on the ends. 

Knife at her belt: not the ornately decorated one with threads of black and silver inlaid into the blade itself, but the plain scratched one that she carried everywhere. She slit the towel’s covering open, and wiped her hands and her mouth clean, and then stood up straight. Tried to smile. “Will I do?”

Was that a smile, twitching at the corner of Crowe’s mouth? “Permission to speak freely?”

Noctis blinked. Nodded, as she joined her. “I don’t give you your orders. And you of all people have no idea of what decorum really is, when it’s me.”

“I have perhaps seen you fall to your knees, and scream at your instructors, and pound your fists into the dirt of the training courtyards one too many times.” Crowe was definitely laughing softly. “You are right. Between you and I, there is no point in dealing with courtly words and courtly respect.”

“I don’t have time for -- that,” Noctis said, and she felt the heavy truth in those words settle across her shoulders once again.

“I wanted to say, why should anyone care, if you should show up at your own birthday feast with crumbs on your mouth? You should be eating whatever it is that you want, tonight. That cake with your name on it. Those tarts. I believe there was a chocolate bar with your likeness carved into it. You should be eating and -- drinking, perhaps supervised, but drinking all the same. You are within one year of your majority. That should count for something.”

“I refused every drink except water,” Noctis said, and the words were quickly interrupted when a courtier in flaring scarlet coat-tails bowed to her, forcing her to return the courtesy with utmost exactness: her dominant foot planted, and her shoulders straight, as she bent her knees just a fraction. She moved on, and didn’t let her relief show. “I still feel heavy, like I’ve been carrying too many rocks.”

A line of concern, now, twitching at the corner of Crowe’s eye. “I do not claim to know what it is like to be under the year’s vow, and so I cannot claim to know what it is to be freed of it.”

“You don’t want to know.”

Noctis could still remember waking up with the ghosts of an old pain still battering into her, like claws lashing her back open, like her bones suddenly exposed to cold wind and the stink of fire and dried blood.

And that ghostly pain still made her scream in the middle of the night -- it was still the worst kind of pain that she had ever experienced -- but the experience of putting on that ring of six-sided shapes and that coldly pulsating crystal was now a close, close second.

Her throat was still scraped a little raw from her own screams, from when she first saw the ring burn great glowing wounds into her own skin.

She had tucked that ring away into a secret pocket she’d sewn into her own clothes, and she could still feel it burning, though she had hidden it in a soft piece of cloth.

She could still hear the words that were echoing in the far corners of her mind -- words in the language of the Astrals, commanding her, compelling her towards the choice that she had had to make.

“You are brave,” Crowe said, suddenly.

Noctis stopped, and stared. “You’re a member of the Kingsglaive. You’ve been at war all this time. How can you say that to me?”

“I fear that -- trinket of yours, and what it is connected to.”

Noctis turned away. Felt the tic of the muscles in her neck and in her jaw, as she fought to keep from grinding her teeth together. “I couldn’t escape it, not even if I tried, huh.”

“Your Highness,” and this time those words were unsteady, and this time, she turned back. 

Crowe was bowing deeply to her, one mail-wrapped fist clenched over the ornate coat and the heart that beat beneath it. 

“I would have served you, despite my fear. I would have gone on your journey with you. But my pledge is given to another, and him would I serve unto my dying breath. If not for that pledge, I would have chosen to go with you. So -- for that -- forgive me.”

There was something in Crowe’s worry, and in her fear, that made Noctis walk up to her -- and place her palm on her bowed head. “Nothing to forgive, Crowe,” she heard herself say. “Even if I never see you again, after tonight -- even then, I won’t forget.”

Not the memory of waking up in Crowe’s battered jacket, after another long night of restless sleepwalking.

Not the memory of Crowe beating her down with her magic, then gently lifting her and bearing her away to her chambers to rest.

Not the memory of Crowe playing a small flute for her, in her feverish haze, one year ago now on this night.

She left Crowe behind, now, and stepped toward the throne set high above the entertainment and the laughing crowds, and she didn’t see how people were pushing each other aside to make way for her: now she only had eyes for the man on the throne, the man who was holding two goblets in his gloved hands, the man who was bent over by sudden age and too many years of war and of wounds and of mourning.

She stopped in the very center of the square, and held her head high.

Met her father’s eyes as best as she could.

One of the goblets shimmered and faded into a shattered aura of crystal-blue fire, and she held out her hand and made it reappear, and it was full of a blood-dark wine.

And Regis Lucis Caelum CXIII rose. Spoke, in a rough whisper that carried clearly into the night: “A toast to the kings and queens of Lucis who protect us still. A toast to the Walls that defend us from the terrors that burn in the night. A toast to the Six to whom we offer these joyous festivities.

“And: a toast to my daughter, who begins her journey to her ancestors and mine. Go with blessings and with prayers, on this night, and all the days and nights of your trials.

“I give you: Noctis Lucis Caelum CXIV, of the Lucii. Your Crown Princess.”

Solemn calls and prayers from all sides.

Noctis took a deep breath, and raised the goblet high, to her father.

When he closed his eyes and sank back down -- and even from here she could almost see the lines of age and pain in his face -- she put her goblet to her lips. Sipped -- the wine tasted like dust made from dried flowers -- and then she drank it all down.

And she let herself vanish from view, leaving only a tall pyre of blue flame in the very center of the public square.

Briefly she warped to her father’s side, to whisper her goodbyes.

And she didn’t wait for him to reply, or even to glance her way -- she simply flashed away again.

Overhead, from the tallest of the towers piercing the skies -- the towers of the Citadel, the stronghold of the bloodline of the Lucii -- a bell began to toll the twenty-four strokes, the last twenty-four minutes to midnight.

She reappeared in her room, and fell to her knees, gasping -- her stomach was roiling and heaving, and she had to swallow, several times, so she could try to take a step forward without attempting to empty it.

Still the taste of the wine lingered between her teeth, heavy on her tongue, and she would almost consent to eat a salad, if those odious vegetables could be guaranteed to wash that terrible taste away.

Black duffel bag leaning lopsided against the foot of her bed -- she staggered, a little, when she picked it up. 

It didn’t go with her dress at all.

But there was something in the bag that she had stored away for precisely this moment.

Back into the crowds and this time, this time no one had to see her, except perhaps for one person.

Flash. Flash. Flash. Everyone else was still enjoying the events that had been laid on to commemorate her nineteenth birthday, the last birthday before she would formally come of age, the last birthday before she would be expected to serve in the way that the Six had ordained for her, until the night should end -- and here, in Insomnia, it was possible to spend these sunless hours enjoying the open air and the shrouded stars, the waning moon in its copper-red crescent as it continued to fall toward the horizon.

She paid them all no heed. Masked her bag and the items in her hand and her own presence from all the gawkers gathered in the square. 

She knew her father’s eyes were still on her as she made this last circuit, because he was the only one here who knew and understood the entire truth, and the entire burden, of what she was about to do.

After this, maybe he wouldn’t be alone in that knowledge.

After this, maybe she wouldn’t have to bear that knowledge all on her own lonely shoulders, either: but there were rules to be followed, still, and these rules held aloft the ideal and the dignity of making a choice.

Until she asked the right questions, until she received the right answers, she would be alone as soon as she passed out of her father’s sight.

She gritted her teeth again. Kept moving. 

Searching, now.

Here was one of them, turning a battered novel over and over in his hands as he sat alone at a table. The remains of several plates stacked teetering next to the heap of his non-regulation leather jacket.

Here was another, sitting alone on a stone bench, pen and small book in hand. The glass by his side still contained a finger’s-width of deep blue liquid, but he did not look like he was planning to drink it.

And here was the third, looking into the depths of one of the ornate fountains ringing the public square, with the little leather case that never left his side all but forgotten as it dangled from his belt.

She warped to each one of them, and kept herself unseen. Only reached out to touch their hands, leaving a faint wisp of her presence behind: three metal tokens, each hammered into the shape of a palm-sized flat disc, almost like ancient coins from the days of legend.

Only the three of them -- and Noctis herself -- would be able to see the images engraved into the discs. On the obverse were a sword and a staff lashed together with cords, the whole crossed with a pair of furled wings. On the reverse was an image of the Ring of the Lucii.

Her father’s ring, that she carried with her now.

Her father’s ring, her link to her ancestors, and her birthright.

The tokens -- two of them made from bronzed metal, and the third one made from white metal -- would each flare white-hot, just for a moment, when it was time for their bearers to move.

That gave her just enough time to warp to the very outskirts of the city, to the carefully guarded garage in which the Regalia waited for her, tuned up and polished and packed with supplies: tents and other camping gear, and three other duffel bags like hers, and that was just the contents of the baggage compartment. 

A part of her mind thrummed with pleasure to see the car’s massive shape again. Years of being a passenger had turned into those wind-blasted months of stealing it away into the night, laughing at herself when she stalled the thing. Racing down abandoned highways with her heart in her throat.

Now she keyed open the front door, and sat for a moment in the smell of leather and wax and metal, and moved. Her hands at her waist, just below where she wore her knives, ripping at the seams of her overskirts with their lace and their flounces. Up to her throat, so she could undo the knot held by black cords, and strip away her crimson-lined cape with the seal of Lucis embroidered grandly onto the back in glittering thread. Finally, down to her crystal-studded shoes, replacing them with the pair of weathered boots she had stored in the open space beneath the steering wheel.

She touched a button on the Regalia’s console and the engine roared to life, filling her up with its powerful cry, and she pulled out onto the street, and she could have navigated the city streets with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back -- but she didn’t need to, not when she knew where she had to go, not when she only had to make it to the very last gates of the city limits.

Here they were, still in their party clothes, as she brought the car to a smooth stop: the three who still held on to the tokens she had left with them. The tokens gleamed in the failing light as they got in, one by one, and she didn’t use the rearview mirror to watch them. All she had to do was look over her shoulder.

The shape of broad shoulders and immense muscles, and even in the night she could see the inked lines bared by his open shirt, and the uncharacteristic braid in which he wore his long hair.

Every person to inherit the crown of the kings of Lucis had fought and ruled and lived and died with a faithful shadow dogging his or her every step: the shadow of the man or the woman who had risen to become that ruler’s Shield. 

She’d only been a babe in arms when she’d first met Gladiolus Amicitia, and so she couldn’t remember her first impressions of him -- but from the moment he was introduced to her as her Shield, he had always and only given her the impression of shelter, the impression of steadiness, and she was thankful for him.

Next to him, pale and silver-touched: thin mouth pressed into a line, gleaming metal-framed glasses, silver-and-black fingerless gloves. 

She had learned to forgive her father for all of the days and nights that he had not been there to tuck her into bed at night, or to soothe her through the years of her convalescence -- but the truth was, given a choice between Regis Lucis Caelum and Ignis Scientia, she’d pick the latter, without hesitation.

He’d only practically had the raising of her, after all -- from cooking her meals to tutoring her through school to leading her through the hell of physical therapy, and all the way to teaching her how to drive this very car. 

Now, under his glance once again, she knew she was straightening her shoulders and sitting up as straight as she could. She knew she was replacing her hands carefully onto the steering wheel, right where he’d taught her, at the ten and two-o’clock positions.

There was the approving quirk in his smile, and the quick movement of his eyes to her right --

So Noctis swung her gaze over in that direction, toward the shotgun seat, aware of bright blue eyes watching her -- and she couldn’t stop herself from grinning, from running her hand through her hair -- the plaits that had been carefully pinned to the crown of her head falling away, falling awry -- and her reward was a happy sigh, and the click of a camera’s shutter.

He couldn’t have been comfortable in his rigid collar and the starched cuffs, but he wore them with skittish grace, with the restless ruffled charm that lingered in the deep lines framing his smile.

Only fools saw the freckles and the artfully styled hair and saw a bumbling adolescent, as gawky as Noctis was still cursed to be in her more careless moments.

She was not a fool, and she saw the way Prompto Argentum moved in the world: saw the confidence that he had only won through long years of working and worrying at himself. 

She watched, most of a laugh bubbling up in her chest, as he glanced frantically between her and the camera he gripped in his hands. 

“See something you like?” she teased.

“Trick question, right,” Prompto said, scratching the back of his head.

The last word was lost in Gladio’s snort. “Still think that’s a stupid line.”

“Must you still resort to pickup lines in any case?” Ignis added as he buckled his seat belt on.

“They all work on me.” Prompto slid his camera firmly into its carrying case, and she let him grab her hand. Warmth eased through her as he pressed an emphatic kiss into her knuckles. 

"Thank you," she said, and turned her hand so she could open his, and flutter her fingertips over his calloused palm.

She only let him go so that she could start the car again, so that she could throw it into gear and into sleek forward motion. “Shall we go?”

“What is it that you have in mind, Noctis?” Ignis asked over the roar of the engine.

She saw her own hands clench around the steering wheel.

Neither the first nor the second of her deep breaths were any help.

“You already know,” she said, and winced, knowing her voice was suddenly too rough. That with only three words, she was making the three men worry -- and not about her driving, not this time.

She felt all their eyes on her as she switched gears with a sudden violent movement of her arm -- as she took the next corner quickly enough to raise a flurry of sparks from the road

As soon as she thought she could get away with it, she bit her lip, and floored the accelerator pedal.

Away from the streets and the houses and the gardens, away from the glare of the street lamps and the neon signs: and this was the road on which her very first memories lay, the memories of a tight seat belt and the worn face of her father, driving as quickly as she was now.

Up, up, to the crest of the hill that seemed to look back toward the safety of the city of Insomnia, and she parked the car in the sedate way that she hadn’t used when it was in motion, and she let her head hang forward a little, to shield her eyes from view.

“Noct. Out with it.” Gladio was the first to speak.

“Everyone out please,” she said, and waited, struggling with her tears, until they stood in a ragged line right in front of the Regalia.

Starlight, waning, let her see the faint shadow she cast as she got out of the car -- the shadow in the shape of her body and the clothes she was wearing, now that the parties were behind her, now that her road was ahead of her. Black dress with its shoulder and skirt seams shredded into rough points, where she’d torn all the long cascades of extra material away. Beneath the dress she wore a sleeveless shirt in white and shorts in dark gray, matching her knife belt. 

There was a jacket, also to match, in her duffel bag -- a knitted garment of snug sleeves and billowing hems, in case they had to walk in colder places.

Still, she hadn’t dispensed with all of the decorations -- she’d still kept the bits of colorless crystal decorating the neckline of her dress, the broken shapes carefully matched to each other and then sewn into place with flexible wire.

One of those colorless crystals marked the position of the secret pocket in which she carried her father’s ring.

In her fist she clung to the ribbons she’d pulled out of her hair only moments ago.

She felt the wind toss her hems from side to side.

She looked up at the three of them, the three who towered over her in their own ways.

She desperately hoped she wasn’t about to cut them all down.

“Whatever it is, Noct, I swear I’m here, we all are, we’ll all get through this, right -- ” Prompto said, taking a sudden step forward, his hands stretching out to her, as if to brush at her tears.

“Let me speak,” she said, and she held his eyes, willing him to stay where he was as she reached into the hidden pocket. As she drew out the Ring of the Lucii, and showed it to them, pinned by her thumb to her palm.

“Princess,” Gladio said, voice rumbling with more than a warning, more than just fear.

She looked at him for only a moment, before speaking again: “Tell me the story of my family’s ring, Ignis. Just like the first time you did it. The only time you did it.”

And by the way he blanched: Noctis knew that he knew.

She expected him to voice his objections first, and he would have had the right of it.

But he only bowed his head and took off his glasses, and spoke, his strangely soft words nearly lost in the winds that moaned in the night.

“Every ruler who has ever taken the throne of Lucis is said to be chosen by the Ring of the Lucii as its bearer, and as the vessel of the power locked within the ring, and the Crystal that it is linked to. With that power, the ruler can see the great task of his or her life through to the very last breath. 

“Each ruler, or ring-bearer, has a specific great task to fulfill, and these great tasks align with the times in which each one lives. In times of peace, the rulers have been judges, or builders, or teachers; in times of war, the rulers have been generals, or sages, or healers. And some of these great tasks are rarer than others: for example, the Rogue Queen, whose task has never fallen to anyone else. For it was only in her time that the great task involved stealing from other kingdoms, from other peoples, for the good of all.

“On attaining the age of eighteen, the presumed heir to the ring undergoes a series of tests, which are administered by the family, where they still exist, or by the ruler and his or her guardians -- and sometimes there is only one test, and sometimes there are many. The testing allows the heir to discover his or her great task, and whether he or she is fit for that great task. Sometimes the heirs do not survive this testing; there have been times when an heir died during these rites, making it necessary for the ruler to look elsewhere to find a new heir. 

“Should an heir pass the tests and discover his or her great task, then he or she is made to swear the year’s vow: for one year, he or she may not speak to anyone of his or her great task.” He looked away, then, and she was almost certain that he was thinking of the past twelve months. “I don’t know why there is such a thing.”

“I do,” she said, and took up the story. “The year’s vow is the last test for the heir: to see whether he or she already knows, or can learn, how to bear their suffering and still be able to walk with head held high in the world. A test of being steadfast. If an heir makes it through that year of silence, then he or she is ordered to begin work on that great task.”

“Allies,” Gladio said, after a ringing silent moment. “Great tasks are almost always dangerous, even when everyone’s at peace. So heirs are given allies, or find their own, and they help keep the heir alive.”

“Yes,” Noctis said.

The wind died down, and the quiet was only broken by the broken rush of Ignis’s breath, sharp with his tears.

“What was your task,” Gladio growled.

Noctis opened her mouth to speak, and -- couldn’t. 

So she looked up at them, instead, and placed the Ring of the Lucii on her own right hand.

Pain! Sharp edges of flame and of power, licking at her, burning around her heart! And Noctis wanted to scream, wanted to tear the ring away, but instead she held her now-freed hand out to the side. 

And just a thought was all it took, just the new-found and new-honed strength of her will and her magic working in chaotic harmony, and she manifested bright blue lights, sparkling motes in the night around her that threw off brilliant flares as they fell together into different shapes:

A staff tipped with an empty ring. A bow, elegantly curved. A spear, trailing shadowy wisps from its sharp point. A sword, plain only in appearance. A shield, four-cornered and razor-edged. And so on and so on.

And she felt that lonely blue light blaze through her as she said, “My great task is this: I am charged to be a Summoner.”

_“No -- !”_

All the shapes floating around her wavered, and she nearly stepped back.

The echoes of Prompto’s strangled cry felt like an attack upon her very heart.

The fear was explicit, now, on Gladio’s face. “Your great task -- is the thing that will kill you.” 

“You, a Summoner -- then there are dark days coming indeed, for you to need to do that -- but it is the very act of Summoning that will drain you of your strength and of your years,” Ignis began, hollow-eyed, and she couldn’t blame him when no more words seemed to come out after that. 

They all looked so fearful.

They all looked at her so differently now.

If they asked her to release them from this, then she would have no choice but to let them leave.

She would do anything, give anything, give everything up, just so they would all stay by her side. 

But she loved them, every single one of them, and she couldn’t think of going on her great task without them -- and she would not drag them unwilling onto her path, just for the comfort of having them there with her.

So she made herself speak, hating the quaver in her words: “I do not oblige you to be my allies -- if you cannot or will not go on this journey with me, you have only to say so, and -- I will release you -- ”

Movement, rushing towards her.

She did not raise a hand to defend herself.

This was the way, she knew. 

Better to be hurt now.

But what attack was this, when she could see tears glittering in blue-sky eyes?

“Noctis -- Six, Noctis, how -- why are you --”

Not an attack, but -- Prompto. This was Prompto and his arms were strong around her, holding her, as if to keep her in place, as if to hold her here in this world, on this stretch of road beneath the stars. This was Prompto, weeping, holding her in an embrace of mythril itself.

The blue fire around her winked out, and the weapons she had summoned lingered only briefly, in glittering outlines.

Again and again Prompto sobbed out her name, and she could no longer hold back her own tears -- she threw her arms around him, clutched back at him, desperate for his steady presence. 

“Now you know why I walked away from you,” she choked out as she hid her tears in his vest. “Now you know what I was going through, one year ago.”

“Now I know.” He was nearly inaudible. His mouth moved against her shoulder, and his words hitched around his tears. “I was an idiot, then -- ”

Noctis gathered the strength to push him away, this time for good -- out of her way, out of her heart -- for his own sake -- 

“I was an idiot to let you go then,” Prompto said, pulling back just a little. Just so that she could see his face. 

How could he smile, and how could he smile at her, when he was still crying? When she had made him cry? 

“I was stupid,” he said. “I didn’t know any better. I won’t make the same mistake twice." 

When he stepped away she nearly cried out her loss.

But despite the shaking in his words, his eyes on her were steady. His tears still falling, as he said, “You won’t get rid of me. Not like this. Not now, not ever. I will stay with you.”

“Prompto,” she whispered, shocked.

Brief coughing, from Ignis’s direction. “You like to hide your kindness so no one sees it, Princess, but -- I should know it’s there. I’ve known you quite a long time, after all. And -- you’re kind, and good, and selfless, because you’re giving us the choice to leave. Speaking for myself, however,” and he was sinking to one knee, “please forgive my impropriety, just once. But -- like hell I’m going to walk away from you now. You cannot give me the choice to leave, because I have already chosen to stay. I pledge myself to you as your ally in your great task. I will be your guardian, Noctis Lastella Lucis Caelum. Princess Noctis -- no, Summoner Noctis.”

“It’s a damned big world out there, and there are a lot of people who are going to be gunning for the head of a Summoner -- especially if that Summoner is you. You’re gonna need a shield now more than ever. So you have my pledge.” And Gladio went down to one knee.

That left Prompto -- and for a moment she thought he might reach for her again, and she desperately wanted to throw herself into his arms -- but she saw him glance at the other two, and then he, too, was kneeling. 

“I didn’t even know I’d be training for all of this, when I first started training. But even if I suck at it -- believe me, Noctis, I’ll do it. My pledge is yours.” He looked up, and smiled, and added, “And my heart. But you knew that already.”

They were all here.

They were all staying with her on her path, even when they knew exactly how that path would end.

Words were too little, compared to the emotions swelling in her heart.

So there were no fitting words other than the ones in the ritual that she had learned for this moment, without any hope that she would actually perform it with them, for them: the three of them here before her.

“You are my allies.” She shook her head, impatiently. “No. You are my friends. And you will take the road that is laid before me, all of you by my side.

“Stand by me through the raging fire and the howling storm. Stand by me to face the crashing waves. Stand by me above the earth and below it. Stand by me in light, and in darkness.”

She called on the power within her once again.

This time, it lifted her from the ground. 

“Stand by me, and I will lend you my strength, as I will draw my strength from you.”

With the hand that wore the black ring, she gestured -- and from three pockets flew the three tokens she had left with them, all spinning wildly in the air. 

Before her eyes, each token changed shape: from flat disc, into blue spark, and finally settling in the form of a large ring.

She let go of the ribbons that she had pulled away from her hairstyle -- three lengths of black ribbon -- and they, too, floated up before her, twisting slowly in the currents of her magic.

“Rise, Gladiolus Amicitia,” she said.

When he rose, she threaded one of the bronze rings onto the longest of the ribbons, then wrapped it several times around his right arm, before tying it off with a firm knot. 

“Rise, Ignis Scientia.” He rose, and she threaded the other bronze ring onto a ribbon, and this she tied around his left wrist.

“Rise, Prompto Argentum.”

When he did, she touched down to the ground in front of him -- smiled, crookedly, and hauled him forward into a kiss.

And behind his back she snatched at the last ribbon and the white ring, sliding the latter onto the former before tying the whole thing around his neck, so the ring rested in the hollow of his throat.

“I love you,” she whispered, when she pulled back.

“I love you,” he answered, loud and clear in the night.

“Now you are bound on the path that I will take, and now a part of my power rests within you,” she said, once she had regained her composure, once she was standing before the three of them again. “You remember you were reminded not to carry any weapons when you left.”

Gladio blinked. “Yeah, about that.”

Noctis laughed, a little, now that she was freed of her fears. “Think of your sword, and when you do, focus on that ring I just gave you.”

She watched him clench his fist and swing it to the side -- and he was suddenly holding a gigantic sword wreathed in blue-glitter lights, identical to his favorite weapon except for the sheen on the cutting edges.

Flash of blue light around Ignis, in whose hands appeared two long and slender knives, beautiful and wickedly sharp.

As for Prompto, she’d often seen him training with one handgun held steady in both hands -- but the ring-and-ribbon, and the power she now shared with him, saw him holding two, the grips textured in faint lines that glowed blue. 

“If you’re in the fight with me,” she said, following his glance at his empty belt, “you won’t run out of bullets.”

“Noct,” he said, and, “Wow.”

That left her to summon her own weapons.

Blue-hot flame in her left hand, that flashed once and then settled, in the form of a staff that was taller than she was, with blue and silver lines braiding and twining up from the plain end. Within the hollow circle at the top gleamed an unfurled wing, and a single black ribbon trailed from a notch just below the circle.

In her right hand, a second flame appeared, briefly burned white, and then changed into a hand-and-a-half sword. The cross-guard was nearly identical to the wing on her staff, and the blade was subtly curved, and sported a deep fuller. Blue and silver cords wound around the hilt to form an ornate grip pattern.

“Your family’s duty,” Ignis said, after a moment. “Those wings are the shield and the weapons against the darkness itself.”

Noctis inclined her head to him, briefly. “And if I’m going to fly, then I’m going to need the pair of them. So, two wings.” 

She closed her eyes and let the world speak to her, in the rumbling beneath her feet and the whisper of the wind. In the changing colors of the moon and the cold glitter of the stars -- and when she thought she could speak the words, she brought her two weapons together, crossing them before her, so that she was looking out at them from over the crossing point. 

“I am the Summoner,” she said, and the world itself seemed to go still and quiet, as if listening to her words. “This is my story, and this is my journey. For the sake of this world: come with me, unto life, unto death, and all points between.”

“Lead us, Summoner,” the three of them said, together.


	2. isn't it a wonder?

She couldn’t breathe.

She could walk upright, and she could even run and dodge and fight on her own knees when the situation called for it.

She could swing a sword through several rapid forms, and she could wave a staff and dance into the intricate weavings of the magic that still suffused the world.

But here, in this place, in this Citadel, she couldn’t breathe, not without hearing the chittering, clawing whispers in the shadows all around her, the shadows of the long gallery with all its steps and its hangings and the great throne on its elaborated dais.

Looming statues and carved stone reaching up as high as she could see, and far too many overly elaborate niches besides: too much darkness in this place, even with the great windows high up in the walls that were thrown open to catch the fading summer sun. 

Maybe her tutors were right: maybe it was an unbecoming thought, maybe it wasn’t even a royal thought -- but oh, how her hand itched now for the touch of a weapon, any weapon. How she itched to be somewhere else -- even if that meant training with Gladio and Ignis and Cor, even if that meant sparring with Crowe, even if that meant history books and the sternly lecturing voices of Clarus and Nyx, all luring her into the safety of sleep. 

When she had been younger, she had played in this place, she thought: she’d run from one shadowed end to the other, tripping over her own feet, chasing the memories of puppies tumbling all over each other and the sweet grin of a girl her own age. 

Now, with her ordeal still too fresh in her mind, she saw only the darkness that these very walls were designed to hold back: she saw them, here, lurking, baring their teeth and their claws at her.

Footsteps, slow and steady, moving in the gallery.

She wasn’t alone here, and wasn’t that what she wanted?

But those footsteps were accompanied by the scrape of a long, long scabbard against sturdy cloth -- and she knew who it was that was here.

She curled in further on herself.

If she could make it so that she could breathe silently, move silently -- she’d flee.

Never mind that she was still afraid to tap into her own magic, into the powers that had been fully awakened within her.

Never mind that there was nowhere she could go and still be safe.

(The thought of a cramped school-dorm bed rose in her mind, and she winced, and tried to cast it away: but she could still feel the squashed pillows and the many-times-starched sheets on her skin.

(She could still feel the tiny space that had been left for her to sleep in whenever she sneaked into that bed, because it was always already occupied by someone who was all wild hair and gangly arms and legs, sprawled out in such a deep sleep that she could never understand what actually drove him to wake up and run in the small hours of the morning.

(After all the things she hadn’t said to him, after all the things that she’d done to him, there just wasn’t any point in remembering.

(In the past few days, what little sleep she’d been able to snatch had been clawed apart by dark dreams -- but she’d always woken up, gritting her teeth against her tears, when she remembered the phantom warmth of that someone’s mouth on hers, the sweet fumbling of his hands twitching the blankets more snugly around her -- )

In the here and now, Noctis sobbed, once -- and she cursed herself several times over for giving herself away.

Those footsteps in the gallery changed course. Changed cadence. 

Those footsteps were moving towards her. 

She didn’t want to look up -- not and see that stern face and the strange kindness that seemed to linger in those deep lines.

“Princess.”

“Cor,” she muttered, pressing her forehead more deeply into her knees. The words fell from her mouth in haphazard bursts. “Cor Leonis. I don’t know, maybe, can I ask you -- can you pretend you didn’t see me here? Can you just -- go away and leave me alone? I -- I can’t even look at you. Look at anyone. You were there ten days ago. You were there, and maybe you have some idea of what I went through, and I can’t stop -- look at me, how weak am I? I’m still falling apart.”

“Noctis,” Cor Leonis, Marshal of the armies of Lucis, said.

It wasn’t a command -- he couldn’t command her -- but she looked up, anyway, into his gentle eyes, into his mouth pressed into a thin line. 

“Cor,” she said, again. “I can’t.”

Was he shaking his head at her? Of course he was. What was he thinking, with Regis’s only heir shattered here, cowering in her own Citadel?

At last he offered her his hand so she could get up and brush the dust away from her school uniform. 

She watched her hands tremble as she settled her dust-wrinkled blazer, the worn hems of her trousers. 

He was already a few feet away when he finally spoke: “I did have orders to find you, and to make sure that you were -- steady on your feet.”

“I’m not,” she muttered at his back. 

Down the main passage of the gallery, toward the throne, and only swerving aside at the last minute to enter another familiar warren of corridors. “And when I had sent you in to your father, I was going to be looking for your companions.”

She didn’t think about Prompto and his kiss, she didn’t: she thought only about protecting him, and Ignis, and Gladio. “What does my father want with them now?”

She was bristling at him for no real reason other than that he was here, and she had no other targets. She should have been ashamed.

“I thought it was my job to talk to them -- and that I couldn’t do that until the year had passed. That’s what the rules say, right? And we all know what kind of stickler my father is for rules.”

“I was going to pass on a few subtle suggestions on, from him and from the other members of the Kingsglaive,” he said. “For how they would train with you. For how they would train themselves.”

“Subtle? Yeah, right. And when are the kings and queens of the Lucii subtle?” Noctis groaned, quietly. “Not going to hold my breath.”

Nothing else for it but to swear, in all the languages she’d learned (and some she wasn’t even supposed to know), when Cor ushered her into an all-too-familiar sitting room. Ornate windows and sparkling glass serving pieces that she’d never seen anyone use. Reds and golds and the last lingering traces of lace on the stiff overstuffed armchairs.

“And then of course you’re going away,” she muttered, when Cor stopped on the threshold and bowed, deeply, before closing the door between him and her. 

Leaving her to mime a kick at the nearest bureau -- she was deliberately trying to miss its curved leg -- and she folded her arms over her chest, and tried very, very hard to clear her mind.

Magic was will, she knew. 

If she lost control here, with the power still driven like spikes into her nerves -- well, she’d be homeless by the time night fell.

So: control, control.

But she couldn’t think of -- things like armor, or the rank patches that Cor and the other Kingsglaive members wore on their formal jackets, or even the wide soft-lined straps that had held her pinned into her hospital bed, when she’d almost broken her back. 

When she thought of control, she thought of music, lilting into an endless sunlit sky, and she thought of pairs dancing and laughing together -- control that meant only a guide into the next series of steps, the next few figures, in a dance that meant stopping every few minutes to laugh because she was just as awkward as her partner, just as cursed with a pair of left feet.

She held her hands out, now, as though her partner really was there with her, as though she was only waiting for the music to begin and for him to smile at her. 

A partner who had golden hair that blazed brighter than the sun. He had freckles dotting his cheeks, swirling into odd patterns down his throat, and disappearing into the collar of his school-uniform shirt -- freckles that were the exact opposite of stars in the night sky. He had a bright laugh that rose to his mouth much too easily, much too frequently: a laugh that was sweet and warm even on those days when it was actually directed at her.

Her partner was the sun in a bright blue sky.

But she was Noctis, she was the night, and she was the cold night without moon and without stars, in the still fearful silence before the approach of true dawn. 

It was the absence of the sun that made the night -- and Noctis could only ever follow that sun, and stare at those places where he wasn’t. 

She couldn’t ever have him. 

She would only break his heart.

But how she ached for him, and for what he gave her the space to be -- so much so that she suddenly felt a deep frost set into her very bones and sinews and she looked up in shock, and stared at the stray snowflakes settling into her skin.

The other door opened as she was still staring upwards, mouth hanging open. 

And she swore, sharp and ringing, as she tried to find the pattern in her mind that would stop this snowfall: “Fuck!”

Two shapes coming into the room. Two men. 

Mild reproof, on the face of the man steadying her father’s elbow.

As for her father, he looked old, and tired, as he always did.

But when he spoke, chiding, the words were not directed at her.

“Don’t fuss -- you’ve heard worse, and from younger,” Regis Lucis Caelum CXIII said.

Clarus Amicitia only rolled his eyes in response.

It looked so strange to Noctis, to see two silver-haired men in formal court dress bantering like they were only at school. 

“I take your point,” Clarus said at last, shaking his head. “Iris is -- well, her tutors despair of her, and so do I. Sometimes.”

“You’ll get over it. And now I’d like to speak to my daughter -- will you leave us, for now?” 

“Of course. I’ll be in the next room should you need me.” And Clarus retreated, but just before he reached the door, he bowed -- first to her, and then to her father. 

By standard court protocols, he should have done it the other way around, acknowledging his king before anyone else.

And this was already the second time he’d done it, in the last two weeks.

“By your leave, Princess. Sire.”

Again a closing door.

Noctis was still standing in the center of her own personal little snowfall, when her father gestured at the fireplace in a corner, igniting it with a quiet sizzling thump.

“Ignis will be after me if you catch a cold,” he muttered as he shrugged off his richly decorated jackets and laid them all in his lap.

She almost snapped out the response that rose to her mouth: “Serve you right.”

But she clicked her teeth shut on the words, and dispelled the snow as best as she could, and stalked towards the fireplace.

“Please, Noctis, I only wished for a moment of your time -- will you not let your own father know how you are getting on? You must know the healers were asking me for permission to keep you sedated a few days longer. They wanted to make sure your body had fully recovered from its recent strain.”

“And how would they have treated my mind?” she growled, quietly.

“I -- ” He seemed to shake his head, and she thought she could see him groping about in his mind for a new topic of conversation. “How is school? And -- your friends? Will you not speak of them? Astrals, Noctis, even for you, two words in a month is too little to be going on with.”

She averted her eyes from the cane that leaned against her father’s chair.

He wasn’t even fifty.

“I don't want to talk,” she said.

“And I would like to ask -- many questions. That is why I have asked you to come here.”

“You’re being too polite, and you’re polite to everyone, but you’re always especially polite to people who happen to be in your way. And today, that’s me. So spit it out already.”

“Noctis.” This reproof wasn’t mild at all.

Again that shame that had haunted her ever since she’d snapped at Cor, earlier. Now it was doubling and heaving in her gut, and she didn’t let it show when she stormed over to one of the other chairs.

But since she’d picked one of the chairs that was farthest away from her father, she’d also wound up exiling herself from the fireplace -- and with the snow she’d created still lingering and freezing just beneath her skin, it became necessary to curl up in the lace-and-embroidery quilt folded on top of it.

When she looked up again, there was something soft and strange in the lines of her father’s face.

“You used to sleep wrapped in that quilt.”

She stared, first at him, and then at the material she clutched in her hands.

Intricate circular patterns, and the sun and the moon and the stars in various interlinked combinations, and here and there the traces of bits of crystal, the threads anchoring them to the ornate woven material frayed with age and long years of use.

Her power flashed, unbidden as it always was now, and brought her an image of a woman, who laughed to watch a dark-haired child wriggle into the bunched and rumpled quilt, then try to be completely still. Playing at being invisible.

And when the game was up, the woman yanked the quilt clean away and laughed at the cloud of mussed black hair, the bright grin in the face of the little girl, whose front tooth was missing.

The little girl had her face, Noctis’s own face.

“Mother,” she breathed, and drew her fingertips over the ragged sun and stars and moon. “She made this. Or she had this made.”

“She made it, and it took her the better part of seven months to finish -- but she finished it in the week before she gave birth. She made it. For you.”

And Noctis didn’t startle, but only by a very slender margin.

Her father’s voice, ragged as it always was now, but perhaps now she could almost understand the mourning note in it, still there after all these years.

She couldn’t even remember her mother’s arms around her. 

“It was a tradition, in her family,” her father was saying. “A quilt made to celebrate the birth of a child -- but it would be a lifelong gift. You would have been wrapped in it on every important day in your life: the day you were named. Your first birthday. It would have been formally passed from her to you on the day you were first named Crown Princess.” He sighed, and it was a terrible old sound, and she almost fought the responding tears in her own eyes. “Some things are torn away from us, and then they cannot come to pass as we would have wanted to. Noctis, I am sorry.”

She looked up, then.

Stared.

Her father’s face, drawn in deep lines and scars. Knowing now about all those things that he’d seen and done, the things that had cut him down, the things that had aged him so suddenly -- knowing all those things did absolutely nothing to ease the burden of that knowledge.

And it hurt even more, to know that she would find herself in his position, and sooner rather than later.

Ten days ago she’d stood below his gaze as he sat on his throne: his gaze, and his words, clarion thunder in her very bones and sinews. 

“Are you ready to undergo your trials?” he’d asked.

And she’d glared at him, and dared him to do his worst. 

He hadn’t had to do anything: he’d only had to bear witness, because the Astrals themselves -- all Six of them -- had come down from the throne itself to test her.

Right now she still couldn’t think about everything they’d said and done and showed to her.

But it had all been so much that she’d collapsed right there on the cold stone of the gallery, with the taste of her own blood choking her. 

From the hushed whispers she heard in the three days of her recovery, she’d learned that the trials had only taken -- two hours, perhaps three, and no more than that.

But it meant something that she hadn’t been able to rise from her bed until after those three days had passed. 

Three days strapped down, and each dragging second too reminiscent of her childhood injuries. 

And then she’d finally started getting up again. Finally gone back to school, to stares from all of her classmates and her lecturers. Finally taken up her lessons again in the training courtyards.

But she’d only continued to nurse her fear and her rage and her pain, and those were the only things that she could have drawn on to fuel her snowflake tantrum, just now.

(And, adding to the horrors of that trial: the howling loss that ate at her heart. 

(How could she have turned away from that boy who shone as bright as the sun, only two weeks ago? How had she walked away from him? How had it only been two weeks since she’d walked away from him?

(Was this what her father carried around with him? Why hadn’t she seen it a week ago? Why was she seeing it in him only now?)

“Sorry,” she echoed. “You’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

Still there was the fear and the loss and the pain -- but suddenly, like waking up from bad dreams, the rage that was consuming her was almost gone. “I used to want to hear you say it. Now, now I’m not so sure.”

He looked up at her. “You deserve my apologies, many times over, and so I will say it, many times over. You deserve to know that I deeply regret these terrible days that have come to pass, and that I am likely to leave you with a heavy burden of an inheritance indeed.”

“Leave me. My inheritance. All of this because -- you’re dying,” she said, numb.

“Not because of this,” was his answer, as he held up the hand on which he wore a black ring. “Or should I say, not only because of this. You should know this, Noctis: Clarus and Cor have only been the loudest voices urging me towards those who can use healing magic. But even they cannot help me now. I am beyond their help.” Slowly he put that hand down. “I have done what I can with my calling, but if you must be a Summoner, then it will be a grim world indeed that I will soon be departing.”

“Shut up,” she whispered. 

“Forgive me, Noctis, if I cannot do as you ask. I have wished to speak these truths to you for so long, ever since I started receiving the reports from -- from your companions. They do not mince words, which means they tell all the truth.”

She looked up at the sound of shuffling: and here was her father, straining to move towards her, to stand next to her chair in its cold corner.

“You made the year’s vow, daughter,” he said, “and I have been in that exact place. I know that you don’t want to be hiding these things, these terrible things that you now know, and that you especially don’t want to be hiding them from your companions. I wish dearly that I could tell you that there is no need to hide.” Tears standing out in his eyes. “But this test is the last test you must undergo before you begin your task, and for the sake of the success of that task, you must hide all of these things for one year.”

She clenched her hands into such tight fists that she expected to bleed.

“And so: you cannot speak of your trials, and you cannot speak of your task. But that is not all that you are, Noctis. I do not know you very well, now, but even these old eyes can see you’ve inherited the very best of your mother. Not me, not the Lucii -- your mother. You are just as fierce and powerful and strong as she ever was.”

She opened her mouth to deny it, and no words came.

“Don’t hide that from -- yourself, or from your companions. And don’t hide from that boy.”

She bit her lip and made herself continue to look her father in the eyes. “Of course you know about him.”

“I do know what he’s like when he’s near you. And perhaps I understand why you act the way you do when you’re around him. I could almost envy you, that you found him so quickly. That he has been your friend for so long.”

“Friends!” she burst out, quiet but intense. “Friends? Him and me? What do you really know? How can you understand -- I don’t want to be his friend, and he doesn’t want to be mine -- ”

“Because you drove him away, just before your birthday. And for what reason, Noctis?

“That I can answer, so you don’t have to speak,” her father went on. “You want to protect him from the pain that comes with being you. You want him to be safe. I -- in my own way, I know what it is to be on the receiving end of that. But -- have you considered that there is a better way of protecting him, of keeping him safe?

“Wouldn’t you do better to protect him by telling him what pains you? Perhaps he might offer some sort of solace. Some sort of kindness.”

“I can’t tell him about what I’ll be doing in one year.”

“Only because you have to wait for one year before speaking of it to him. It is a year’s vow, and not a lifetime’s.”

“Even he knows what a Summoner does,” she said, and now she was shocked to hear her own sobs. “Even he knows what happens to a Summoner.”

“Then he would still have had the choice to decide for himself: whether to follow you or to abandon you on that road.”

She tore her gaze away, reluctantly, then. “Been there, done that?”

“Yes.” He almost smiled, and she almost saw the man who’d taken her out for midnight drives in the Regalia. “I suggest you ask Clarus sometime. Before I could properly find my way in terms of ruling, in terms of my own great task, your mother and I would clash again and again. And it was almost always a one-sided match, ending in her favor.”

Sunlight, unexpected, flashing on the braided cord her father wore at his shoulder.

Flash of gold cords mixed in with the black. 

Gold, like Prompto’s hair that fell into his eyes when he woke up, or when he was coming back from one of his early-morning runs. 

She wanted to scream. She wanted to strike away the tears falling down her father’s face.

She got up, instead, heedless of him pulling back. The quilt, huge and billowing, was unwieldy in her arms as she stumbled from the chamber, past --

“He’s learning how to use the sword, and he’s not very good at it, but he’s trying. I’d rather he stuck to -- guns. He might even be good with a crossbow, if he can just sit still for a moment,” Cor suddenly said, just as she was storming past the window sill he sat on.

A thought struck her, then, as she understood what he was trying to say. “How long have you been guarding Prompto?”

Something twitched in his otherwise stone-faced expression. “You only need to know that I have been. Everything else is irrelevant.”

She went to stand next to him, then.

His window looked down onto the training courtyards far below, and the sunlight flashed up at her from three moving blades, from three shadows clashing.

“Here,” Cor said.

She looked at him.

Her knife belt in one of his hands, and a knife in the other. 

“I take two, usually,” she said, as she dropped the quilt onto the sill for a moment. Fumbled with buckling the soft gray leather around her waist.

“Bring mine back then.”

Cor’s knife was sleek and black and leaf-shaped. 

She drew it from its sheath and turned it over and over, carefully, in her hands. “Good balance,” she said, after a moment. 

“It was made that way. Now go get him.”

He was almost smiling, in the brief glimpse of his face that she caught before he rose to his feet and walked away.

When he was gone, she sniffled, once, and dashed away her tears, and drew the other knives on her belt.

Strange to know that people like Cor -- and even her own father -- could support her in this. 

But they did, and so she called on her power: she tossed up the three knives, and seized them with her own magic. They spun and twirled around her for a moment and then she drove them out the window, out and down, and she clutched the quilt close to her heart before leaping out after them, the wind shrieking around her, the world itself sparking and blurring blue around her as she fell and flashed and --

Landing! The powerful jolt of suddenly stopping -- the impact jarred her teeth, left her weaving for a moment, and the stones beneath her feet buckled and groaned, threatening to shatter as she shakily thrust her knives back into her belt.

Three faces staring at her, and then --

“Impatient,” Gladio grumbled, as he shouldered his sword and turned away.

“We shall work on your subtlety,” Ignis said, clicking his tongue as he sheathed his knife, and followed in Gladio’s wake. “And your landings.”

That left her alone in the courtyard before all the eyes of men and of the Astrals, and she would have hidden her face if it were anyone else but Prompto.

It hurt to see the lines that were new in his face, that seemed to have appeared in his face in just the two weeks she’d been away from him.

The wind swirled dust around in the courtyard, and it riffled at her skirts, at the spiked tips of his hair.

“Pretty,” he said eventually, his gaze seemingly nailed to the stones at her feet. His hand wobbled as he pointed to her quilt.

“I,” she said. Swayed on the spot. The quilt was between them. It was the walls she’d thrown up between them. It was the only thing keeping her from rushing at him. “I brought it because it was given to me, a long time ago, by someone who loved me. And now I want to pass it on to someone else, someone who can -- ”

“I lied,” Prompto said, suddenly.

The words fell out of her mind with the shock.

“Last time. Uh, last time, remember what I said to you last time? I said I hated you, I said I never wanted to see you again, I said I regretted that I loved you. I said all that and -- and all that was a lie.” Tears falling onto the sword that Prompto was still hanging on to, as though it were keeping him upright. 

And with a start Noctis recognized that the sword he had been training with was her own practice blade. How strange to see him with it, and how right, even though it couldn’t possibly have been a comfortable sword to use, because it was sized exactly for her and for her way of fighting. The long two-handed hilt and the lightly curved blade, and the deep fuller that made the weapon easy for her to swing around. The tatters of the leather cords that had once trailed from the cross-guard, and the neat black tassel that still hung from the hilt.

And his words were running through her mind, hope sharper than any weapon: 

“Everything I said was a lie except for the part where I said I loved you. Because I’m an idiot, and I love you. And I don’t care what you do to me, what you say to me, what you want of me. Even if you never return it again: I love you,” and Prompto turned away, then. “I’ll always love you, but if you really don’t -- if you really can’t be with me -- then that’s all right, Noctis. I’ll love you from far away if that’s all I can do. If that’s all I can get.”

Words almost failed her again, and she reached out to his retreating back, and whispered, “Don’t go, Prompto -- don’t go without this.”

She had to give him the quilt.

And she flashed forward again, this time towards her sword in his hands -- she warped back into the world and she had exchanged her quilt for the sword.

This time there was an ache in her side when she landed. 

His astonished face made up for it, and the way the sunlight blazed onto him, once he realized that he was holding her quilt. 

She made herself continue to look at him. Made herself explain, as she gestured helplessly at the material piled in his arms. “That quilt was made for me to love," she said, halting with each word. “I don’t know if I was supposed to pass it on to someone, and there’s no one for me to ask now. But -- I want to pass it on to you. I want you to have it. I want you to be wrapped up in it. I loved it, and I love you, and I don’t know what to say, because I want you to come back to me, but -- there are some things you need to know first -- ”

She glanced at him, and her heart sank when she saw how his hair was falling into his eyes, hiding his feelings from her.

“Can we talk?” was all she could tack on, lamely.

“Say it again,” Prompto said, his head still bowed over the quilt.

“Say what again -- can we talk?” How Noctis hated the way her voice shook. “Please?”

“Not that.” His knuckles showed bone-white against his dark gloves, against the pale material of the quilt. “What you said before that. What you said about the quilt. Say it again.”

She had to think, hard, and -- finally, thought she might have hit on it. “I loved that quilt. I still love it. But I want you to have it. Because I love you.”

He looked up, then.

He was the sun blazing in her watery eyes, and she didn’t want to blink or look away from him.

“I love you,” Noctis said. “And I’m sorry I broke it off with you. I -- I thought I was doing the right thing -- ”

And Prompto said, very quietly, "Noctis? Stop talking.”

She did. 

“I’m going to drop this quilt,” he went on. “And you’re going to drop that sword. Right? Because I -- I really need to kiss you right now. I’m going to kiss you, and that is going to be a thing that happens, and when I kiss you I don't want anything between us.”

She still had to try to give him some kind of hint, despite the vow. “Except the things I have to tell you -- and the things I can’t tell you, not yet.”

“I don't care,” was all he said. “I mean. Not right now, I don’t care about those things right now. Whatever it is we have to talk about. Lots of things, because I have things to tell you too. But right now -- ”

She took the first step towards him -- and another, and another, till she closed the distance, till she could wrap her arms around him.

How warm he was, here in her arms. 

And she looked up at him, brave now, waiting, as he drew closer and closer and he was becoming a blur in the world, and her eyes were still open and on him as she fell into his kiss.


	3. sometimes you fly

“Oh, I must applaud you, Crown Princess -- how far you’ve come already, and in such a short time since we have been acquainted, too! Master of the Aeons already, and still able to walk upright, still able to face me.”

Her hands twitched with the rage that coursed through her veins, the rage that fueled her magic with hatred.

If he’d only stop talking, she thought, if the bastard would only shut the fuck up -- she’d leap on him, and smash his face in with her bare hands if she had to --

Flash in her mind of herself, screaming in pain in a meadow full of sylleblossoms, her back broken, and Ardyn Izunia gloating not just at the fact that she was in such pain, but also because he had just killed the Queen of Tenebrae -- 

Red blood on blue petals, a terrifying stain -- 

In the here and now, Ardyn was still talking, the mad smug bastard -- 

“Come on, Noctis, come on and give me your heart. That good strong heart of yours in which the Aeons now shelter. Give it to me, give me your power, and I promise I’ll use them well -- I promise I’ll erase this world that’s full of pain, and I’ll make something better, something better -- ”

“You’re going to make a better world? You don’t even know what that is!” 

Wild whine of a bullet, a desperate insane prayer of a shot, and of course it went wide -- she looked past Ardyn, willing herself not to see him.

She had better things to focus on, better things to find, in this world.

Against her explicit orders, here was Prompto on the top of the train with her, and the weak sunlight caught in his hair and on his gun -- how he held it steady she had no idea, when she could almost burn herself on the fury that twisted his face.

She had to force herself to put the story he’d told her, his tears stark on his face, out of her mind.

A story of being stolen away, of being destroyed and turned into nothing more than an object, something fouled, something very much like a pawn -- and all of it could be laid at the feet of this very same man who was trying to kill her.

Ardyn’s sins outnumbered the very stars in the night, and chief among those sins was the one he had committed against Prompto: the one that had almost destroyed him again and again --

No, no, she’d lose control if she went that way. 

But she needed the rage, so she thought of the message from Cor, instead: the message that said her father had stood before the Citadel and summoned all the last traces of his own power that he had sent into all the corners of the very city of Insomnia, on the night when the horrors broke through into the streets -- how Regis and the remnants of his Kingsglaive had bought just enough time for half the city’s population to escape the daemons -- he would have saved the whole city if not for Ardyn running him through with the same black blade that he was now pointing threateningly at Prompto -- 

A massive explosion just behind her, and a shout that could only have been Gladio, though the screaming winds of the train’s passage and the soaring mountains above them tore the words through: “Gotta make way for the princess!”

She blessed him, then.

And took a deep breath, a cleansing breath.

Attacking in the blazing heat of her rage wouldn’t do anyone on this train any good: Ignis wrestling with the controls, and Gladio guarding his back -- and the two of them still fighting to protect her. The passengers and the crew, all trying to survive the onslaught of the MTs, and the terrible thing they carried around in their armor.

She watched with the rage cooling into bitter ice within her as Ardyn forced Prompto down to his knees.

And she threw back her head and cried out -- 

But it was not rage that she released into the world, not the ice and not the fire within her.

Something better, Ardyn had said.

She’d show him something better.

He’d called her the Master of the Aeons.

She wasn’t obliged to confirm that.

So she screamed, and what broke free from her was a triumphant cry, a blessing, a grateful shout that would rock the heavens themselves, and she would be the channel and the guide and the way. 

Here, now: she had to focus, and fortunately, there he was, spitting curses even with the sword kissing his throat.

There he was, with a gun in his hand.

No ordinary gun, that Prompto refused to let go of even when he knew how useless it was in this confrontation: it was a gun that he’d drawn beneath the stars in the night sky, that he’d forged with his own will and his own heart from the churning currents of a Summoner’s power.

A gun that he’d drawn from the white-metal ring he wore at his throat, tied snugly against his pale skin, held in place by the ribbon she had given him on the night after her nineteenth birthday.

That gun was his and his alone, and it would respond only to him -- and to the one who had given him the means of creating it.

That gun would respond to her.

It made a fine focus in the world, a safe place, a fixed spot that she could find, created by his heart and by hers.

And joyfully, Noctis leaped upward, straight into the billowing turbulent sky, and flashed from moment to moment until she was landing lightly on her own feet, until she was standing over Prompto, her front pressed to his back, her arms wrapped tight around his shoulders.

She looked up at Ardyn and snarled out a wordless challenge.

Ardyn only smirked, and moved the blade of his sword down to her bare arms.

She felt that evil edge approaching, and she had to move, now, now -- 

Blindly she threw one of her knives behind her, and even as it moved she, too, was vanishing, leaping backwards with Prompto still safe in her arms.

Just a little distance was all she needed, and she wouldn’t even have that distance for long, so she pulled Prompto to his feet and held both of his hands tightly.

The roar of the train and of the wind forced her to shout at him: “Do you trust me?”

So close, and she saw the way his eyes went wide. The way his face crumpled, halfway between a sob and a smile. And: “ _Yes_ I trust you, of course I trust you! Fucking -- Noct, seriously, you’re asking me this now?”

He looked like he was about to look over his shoulder.

She could see Ardyn perfectly fine, bearing down on them, one hand already stretched out to snatch Prompto from her -- 

She wasn’t going to let that happen.

And she couldn’t be insulted by the way that Prompto was still sputtering at her -- she could only laugh, and draw him close. 

His arms coming up around her, clutching for dear life.

She pressed her mouth to the side of his throat.

The weight of his gun caused her to wince, where it rested on the burns that were still on her back -- but she blocked it all away and breathed him in. Drew in all her joy and her pain and all the power she had, all the grace and the sweetness he had given her. 

And she whispered, with her soul on her lips, “Then -- no matter what happens, don’t let go.”

“You will not escape me so easily!” Ardyn screamed.

Carefully, lightly, she backed Prompto toward the edge of the train, and it took all her strength, all her will, to move -- she couldn’t, didn’t, hear anything else her enemy might have been saying -- 

“Fuck, Noctis,” Prompto was saying, shaking even as he clung to her, as she pressed him closer, heart to heart, and then with a lurch they were going over the edge, down, down, and all around them with sickening speed rose the gaping chasms of the jagged old mountains, snow and bitter winds churning around them --

His arms were still locked around her. 

Naked fear on his face, and yet he was still trying to keep his focus on her, and not on the part where she’d thrown them from the train -- 

And she caught his eye, and smiled at him until he tried to smile back, and she said, first, “Thank you.”

He trusted her, even in this, and she was so, so grateful for that trust.

The next thing she said left him blinking in shock, in confusion, even though the word was not in a language that he knew or could even comprehend as language, for the word she spoke was in the language of the Aeons, and it was a prayer, it was a command: 

_TO ME!_

She heard the rush of the rage and of the cold in her veins as it left her, as it seemed to plunge away from her, faster and faster and unimaginably faster still -- 

Red light, far below -- brighter and brighter it flared, a star streaking upwards from the ground -- it seemed to reach up for the man she held in her arms. It pierced him through and he cried out, wordless with shock and fear -- 

But as that red flare passed through her, in turn, she only felt warm. She only felt certain. She only felt safe.

Looking into Prompto’s eyes, she saw an image of the flare that turned into a shadow, a shadow that was falling toward them, that was growing and growing and now, he was open-mouthed and staring, because he could see what she could sense -- that great presence of sleek muscle and sinuous tail, broad chest and long-clawed limbs -- 

And its wings were unfurling as it matched their falling speed and plucked them gently out of the air.

Wings, the massive wings of membrane and feathers intermingled, and the curious tilt of a great birdlike head, the strange calm of a cruelly hooked beak, those eyes that only appeared predatory -- and she and Prompto were being folded into the embrace of Valefor: the Aeon who answered the prayer of those who were pure of heart.

The Aeon that had just caught them -- she saw its wings beat, powerful enough to catch the stormlike winds of the mountains, once. Twice. 

And Valefor was bearing them away now into safety, away from the train, away from Ardyn and his MTs.

She sat up on Valefor’s chest and touched its beak, and smiled -- and the Aeon crooned at her, a high sweet vibration that lodged itself beneath her heart. 

And then she looked down at Prompto, rigid in her lap for only a moment before he was scrambling to his knees, staring at the kind eye that the Aeon had tilted in his direction.

“Oh, gods -- oh, fuck me,” he whispered. “I -- thank you -- ”

Valefor chuffed out a rough sound that sounded curiously like a laugh.

Noctis allowed herself a chuckle of her own -- and then she reached for Prompto, cradling his dear face in her hands. “You all right?” she asked. “Prompto. Focus. I’m here.”

“Noct,” he said, at last. And, “What did you just do?”

“He was going to kill you or take you away from me or worse,” she said. “You promised you’d guard me. I also made a promise to be with you. So here we are.”

Something like a sob fell from his lips. “I -- you know what he did to me. You know what he was going to do to me -- ”

“I did,” and that rage flared up again, and she flicked her hand out into the wind as if to let it go. “He’ll never lay hands on you again.”

“Next time we meet him, I’ll kill him.”

“We will,” she said. 

“Oh, gods,” Prompto said, again. “Your -- your dad.”

“Ardyn killed my dad, yeah,” she said. “And the Kingsglaive who were still with him. They’re all gone now. There’s only you and me and Gladio and Ignis to do this. We’ll make him pay for his sins.”

“So we’re really going to have to meet him again.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck,” Prompto said.

“Fuck,” she echoed.

His hand around hers clenched tightly, and she clutched back despite the pain.

Her power flashed in her mind, and she saw another possibility -- the possibility she had prevented from happening, just now.

Prompto, bound and chained to a metal cross, bleeding and weeping in a place of daemon blood and human death.

She pulled him close once again, as the Aeon landed just outside of a shed that overlooked the train where it would soon be passing by again.

“This is a good place for an ambush,” Prompto said, when they were standing on their own feet again.

Noctis nodded, and then turned back to Valefor. “Thank you. Until I call on you again -- rest.”

Again that croon, and then Valefor closed its eyes and shimmered away into glittering blue and red specks, that she gathered with her hand and pressed to her heart.

“He was going to make you into an MT for real,” she said, and felt Prompto go rigid beside her.

“How do you -- ”

“Power,” she said, simply, opening and closing her free hand.

“I don’t want that,” he said.

“I know. That’s why we jumped.”

“Noctis,” he said.

“I think we just changed the world,” she said, and the wind almost carried her words away. “I think we’re going to be given all these chances to make it all better.”

“If we’re with you, if I’m with you, then we can do better,” Prompto said. 

She smiled, and kissed him. “Yeah. Something like that. This is the start. This is where we start.”

And she kissed his hands, next. “You trusted me. Thank you.”

He was blinking rapidly, as if to drive away the tears she could suddenly see in his eyes. “I had to trust you. I had to -- when we were falling from the train, I suddenly thought, you did it to save my soul.”

“So we’re even, now,” she said. “You saved my soul. Now I’ve saved yours.”

She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her so she was no longer looking at the train tracks far below.

Here he was, the immense and real presence of him in this world, still with her, and with that bright heart of him shining in his eyes -- that she could feel even as he kissed her, hard enough that she felt her toes curl in her boots.

The long low cry of the oncoming train made him sigh against her mouth and pull away.

But before she could ache for him, he said, simply, “We’re never going to be even there, Noct. Trust me on this. And I’ll be happy to be in your debt always.”


	4. picking up the pieces

Something was wrong in the whistling of the wind, in the jerking motions of the clouds that scudded across the face of the full moon, and she couldn’t sleep, not even when she was caught between the cool of the night and the crackling blaze of the campfire.

This was a safe place, wasn’t it? There were daemon wards in the night and she had even gone around to them when they had first arrived, leaving the others to unpack the tent and the folding chairs and the camp stove, feeding a little more power into each so she could shore up the walls between the others and the teeth and the claws that hunted when the sun went to its rest.

It was a night like any other, and they were even supposed to be heading back to the Wiz Chocobo Post in the morning, so they could check in on the progress of the latest hatchlings, so that promised a relatively light-hearted start.

At least there were still chocochicks in this world.

But from the moment that she’d waved the others into the tent because she’d drawn the short straw for first watch, she’d felt -- well, not uneasy, not that exactly. 

Something tugging at her, somewhere in the back of her mind.

How she wished Luna were here. How she wished Crowe were here. They might be able to tell her she wasn’t going mad. 

Because she felt like she was hearing her own voice, talking to her, urgently, and -- that was never a good sign, was it? Her own voice telling her to get on with the thing that she needed to be doing? 

What was the thing that she needed to be doing?

She reached into her duffel bag and pulled out one of Luna’s letters at random, and at the bottom of the last page was a clumsy sketch of Umbra -- but there was too much puppy fat on that stumpy frame, and all the teeth were crooked, and she was pretty sure that the dire wolf’s tail was shorter than that.

It had been a month, maybe more, since she’d last crossed paths with her friend.

She couldn’t even settle her own mind to think of a letter to write to Luna, so trying anything to do with the Aeons was right out.

Noctis shivered, and stole the blanket that Ignis had left on his chair, and wrapped herself up in it as best as she could.

Not the Aeons, right. She wasn’t a Summoner with her Aeons living within her, curled around the place where her magic lived.

The problem was a lot bigger than that, because she was a Summoner of Astrals now.

Four Astrals, and she didn’t really know what Valefor was at this rate, because it wasn’t connected to any of the Six that she knew of, and four of the Six were living within her now.

In a sick way, it made sense, and that was only the first part of the puzzle, but at least now she knew why she had suddenly started summoning the Royal Arms of Lucis whenever she jumped into the front lines of the fight. All the other swords she’d ever summoned looked much like her own, but now she was fighting with things like -- the Katana of the Warrior, and the Swords of the Wise and of the Wanderer, and -- no one had ever warned her about this, no one had ever even trained her for this.

What next, she thought, pressing her hands to her temples to fend off the pain building at the back of her head, what next? Would she suddenly wind up swinging the Axe of the Conqueror at something? The Star of the Rogue? 

The Astrals had bestowed those weapons onto her ancestors.

 _And she was carrying the Astrals around with her_. What kind of fucked-up great task was this?

What were they going to ask her to do, all of them, when she had finally gathered them in one place, in the place where her magical powers lived?

Rustling, from very close by, and the sound of the tent door zipping open, and -- “Noctis?”

The next thing she knew, she was hyperventilating, and something was being pressed into her shaking hand: “Drink this, hurry,” said the voice from very close by.

A very tiny glass. A very blue liquid.

Noctis swallowed every drop and immediately started coughing, and the burn on her tongue didn’t come from the heat of the drink -- it had come from the fact that she’d just downed a shot of Ignis’s favorite liquor.

She coughed, and dashed at the tears in the corners of her eyes, and stared at him, when she could focus on his presence in the camp chair to her right. “What the actual fuck, Ignis?”

“I admit it wasn’t the best of remedies. Just the fastest one I could think of,” he said, and the scars in his face bunched up around the rapid lopsided quirk of his mouth. “I thought you were going to start -- screaming, or some such. I had to act to stop it.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I think.”

“I merely didn’t want to awaken the others.”

She turned to him because at least she could have some kind of conversation with him, even when her head was starting to spin from the shot. “Are you all right? You hurting or something?” And she waved, vaguely, at his face.

She could still remember the reckless desperate drive to Lestallum: Gladio driving like there were daemons still crawling up the ass of the Regalia, though they had long since left the infested swamps behind, and the front passenger seat empty, because she and Prompto were trying to hold on to a thrashing, weeping Ignis in the back seat. 

She could still smell the copper-dust of his blood when she sat in the car: and she’d learned from him at some point that head wounds bled terribly and weren’t guaranteed to deal lasting damage, but that was scant comfort when she’d been trying to save his gouged-out eye, trying to hold it in place with her magic, with Prompto bracing Ignis’s arms and legs as best as he could. 

He had lost that eye.

And she still couldn’t understand how he had slept for two days and nights and then gotten up in time for the last watch of the night, muttering apologies to her, and to the others, where they were huddled in the corner of a rundown hotel lobby, the only place in the city that had hosted anything like a decent clinic.

“It hurts,” he said, and he was responding now to her question, and she saw his hand white-knuckled on the arm of his chair and she gave in to the impulse to hold that hand in both of hers.

She sternly ordered herself not to cry when he clutched back at her.

“Forgive me,” he said, again, suddenly.

“Either apologize after you’ve been sullen, or don’t apologize at all,” she said. “And I want it on the record that this is now the thirteenth time that you’ve apologized, and this is now the thirteenth time that I’m refusing your apology. Gods, Ignis, you deserve to be pissed off at everyone and everything -- you lost a fucking eye, after all -- ”

“Language,” he said, but he was gentle with it.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

“Thirteen times I’ve been sullen, is it?” he asked.

She blinked and looked away from the fire. “And if you plan to be sullen all the days of your life -- honestly, I don’t think I could blame you. Don’t want to speak for the others but -- maybe they’d say something much the same.”

“It is a waste of time, being sullen,” Ignis said. “Not when -- I really did come out here to see if you were all right, you know. That thing you’ve learned -- that secret -- it can’t be sitting easily on your mind.”

“Big understatement for a big secret,” she said, and when she laughed she heard a sharp edge in her own voice. “Bigger than this world. Bigger than the universe.”

“The stories about Summoners dying at the end of their roads are starting to make morbid sense.”

“They can pretty it up all they want for novels and shit like that,” she said, “nothing changes the fact that anyone who becomes a Summoner is going to become a tragedy.”

“So -- how are you dealing with it,” he asked, a little quietly.

“I’m dealing with it by not thinking about it,” she answered, a little too smartly. “Don’t ask me if I think it’s working. I couldn’t tell you a thing.”

“I wish I could do the same,” he said. “But until I can adjust to -- the lack of depth perception, among other things, I’m afraid I’m going to be somewhat of a -- ”

She slapped his hand, then. “If you say anything that sounds like the word _burden_ , so help me, Ignis, I’m going to kick your ass, and then I’m going to wake Gladio up and I’m telling him you said that, and then I’m going to make popcorn and watch while he kicks your ass. And I’m going to tell Prompto to take pictures of everything.” She let him snatch his hand back, and didn’t stop talking. “The fact that you’re still here on this road with me is enough. Is far more than enough. You need to look after yourself and you need to learn how to live with your current condition, and if you’d begged off for the rest of this great task to do that, I would have let you leave without any complaints. But you’re here, and I -- I can’t even believe that you’re still here. 

“I’m so grateful that you’re still here,” she finished, in a very small voice.

“But I cannot do any less than the example that has been set before me,” he said, after a long silence.

His words were almost lost in the rising moan of the wind.

She thought about that for a moment. “Example? Who did you know who was -- really badly hurt?”

He laughed, then -- and it was a short and brittle sound, but it also sounded honestly amused. “You might know her. Likes to sleep. No love for vegetables. Will only eat fruit at swordpoint. Too much of a sap around a certain boy her own age. And a truly formidable fighter, no matter what sort of weapon appears in her hand.”

She had to try and close her mouth with her own hand. “When the hell did I set you an example? The way things work it’s always the other way around -- ”

“Do you remember when I was introduced to you?”

Too many subjects all at once, what was he playing at?

But when she tried to think of an answer, she remembered sleeping with nothing but a thin blanket between her back and a plank of wood. She remembered the creak-creak of the wheels on a chair that was not comfortable and would never be comfortable, no matter how many blankets and cushions were in it with her.

And she remembered Ignis, the younger version of him with his hair still combed back and away from his face, standing tall as he shook her hand, when she couldn’t stand to greet him properly.

“You look like you’re starting to get it,” he said, and he was squinting at her, now. “I heard you cry in the night because everything was hurting you. I heard you snap at people, when it got to be too much. But every time you snapped you cried, and apologized, and you tried to be a child who would give no trouble.”

“Not that it worked,” she said. 

“No, not all the time. The things you did because you thought you could get away with them,” he said. “Still. I think I didn’t know that I was learning something from you, back then -- I just wanted the task of raising you to go easier.”

“I was not the best of children, whether in a wheelchair or not,” and she might have felt a little proud of her younger self.

“That was a good thing.”

She snorted. “I just heard you say you wanted me to be a good quiet little girl, and now you’re telling me something else.”

“Because if I had gotten my wish, then you would have lost that spirit within you. That fire that burns inside you. And that’s the lesson, really, that’s the example. You were cruelly restrained in those years when you should have been running and getting into all manner of scrapes, and -- honestly, the restraints did nothing to deter you. You still wanted to live. You still wanted to make your own choices. I want to do the same thing.”

He sighed, and her heart went out to him, and she reached out and pulled him close, letting him rest his cheek on her shoulder. 

They were an awkward fit, with her tangled up in his blanket and the camp chairs getting in the way, but she felt him sigh, felt the wetness of his tears soaking into the layers of her clothing.

She petted his hair, a little, and when he wrapped his arm around her waist and squeezed for just a moment, she said, “No one is making you hurry.”

“No, no one here in this camp,” he agreed, before pulling away. “Those Astrals within you, however, may have other ideas.”

“They can go fuck themselves, at least for now,” she muttered. “All that power they had and they couldn’t be bothered to reach through me to help you.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said, sharply.

“I don’t blame me. I don’t blame you. I blame the daemons. I blame fucking Ardyn for putting us all in this position. I swear I’m going to make his death very, very painful.” Noctis felt the tears coming on again. “At this point, he’s hurt everyone I love in this world: you and Gladio and Prompto, and I can’t list anyone else any more, because most of the people on that list are already dead, or as good as. I’m going to take it all out of his sorry ass, when the time to finish this task comes.”

“I will work hard,” she heard him say. “I will work hard to make sure that I will be worthy of standing by your side, at the end of your task.”

“Think whatever you want,” she said, “just believe in this: you don’t have to work hard to be worthy. You already are. Even if you have to get some help from time to time.”

“I don’t know what to say,” he said, and she smiled when he chuckled.

“Give me some more of that blue stuff. And pour yourself a double shot.”

He laughed outright, and that was a good sound to hear indeed in the night. “As you command, Summoner.”


	5. closer than every breath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fic rating changes because of this chapter, folks.

The voice in the back of her mind -- the voice that sounded so much like her own, except rougher, like it hadn’t been used for years and years -- was talking to her again.

Was praying, she thought. Struggling to find the right words to offer up a prayer.

Maybe the owner of that voice, whoever it might be, might be able to spare a few thoughts for her.

And there was something seriously wrong with her, right now, because she was drop-dead tired and she was still trying to fight the itch that was building beneath her skin, the itch that was centered on the fresh slashes up her right arm -- fucker, that had _hurt_ , and swinging her sword -- any sword -- was going to be a bitch for a good long time -- and she would have beat a hasty retreat into the oblivion of sleep, any day.

She would have fallen asleep by now, she thought. She would have fallen asleep hours earlier, since they were here in this hotel -- this unexpected place in the middle of nowhere, just barely surviving and the food was sketchy as hell, but at least the beds were actually soft.

But she couldn’t sleep.

She wanted to scratch at her wounds.

She wanted to punch something.

What was wrong with this place? What was wrong with her? Here she was in her own room -- they’d only just rolled in and the owner had immediately given them his four best rooms, and a complimentary bottle of some local firewater besides, and that bottle had immediately gone to Ignis, so he could use it in his cooking if he wanted -- here she was and the bed was calling her name, and she didn’t even have to share it with anyone and that was the height of luxury these days -- 

But no matter how she squirmed and tossed over the pillows she couldn’t seem to rest -- 

Maybe there was booze somewhere else in the hotel, or at the very least a less crappy Wi-Fi signal, so she could update her _King’s Knight_ and maybe wear herself out doing one of the boss fights she’d stalled out on -- 

Soft tap on the door.

She rolled off the far side of the bed, landing in a combat crouch, and a gun that looked a whole lot like one of Prompto’s favorites appeared in her hand, gleaming blued -- “Who’s there?”

“It’s me.”

And the door opened to reveal Prompto, and the cloud of soft leaf-scent that wafted in with him.

She blinked. “What is that you’re wearing?”

“Oh this,” he said, as he took a step into the room. “They said I could wear it after I was done with the -- the thing, downstairs, what did they call it? Place where the water’s always hot. Like hot, steaming hot. Felt like I was in soup, you know? Getting cooked from the inside out.”

She watched him cross to the foot of her bed and sit down, slow, but not in a pained kind of slow way.

He looked like he’d just been wrung out and carefully hung up to dry, and he looked so relaxed as he sank down into her creased sheets. “Sorry, I might fall asleep right here, you’re cool with that?”

“Yeah,” she said, after a long moment of staring at his chest. His white -- robe? -- of some kind hung open nearly to his waist, exposing a deep sliver of his torso -- she could see the stretch marks around his navel, the muscles of his chest. Flash of his ribs, jutting out, when he took a deep breath.

Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she tried to swallow, so she could ask him questions and not have it all sound so weird. “Hot water. Unlimited hot water?”

“In a pool, like, with rocks all around the sides,” was his answer, low and sleepy and smiling. “So good. I wanted to stay in there forever. But -- I kind of thought you guys might like it? So I came up and yours was the first room I saw.”

She blinked again. “Ignis’s room is closest to the elevator.”

“Your room is closest to the stairs.”

She heard him sneeze, a quietly contained explosion followed by the brief wash of embarrassed red across his cheeks. “Ugh, sorry,” he went on. “So, wanna come with?”

She wanted to, in a way that squeezed at her heart and -- lower. 

“Yeah,” she said, and she was scrambling off the bed and reaching for the bag in which she kept her shampoo and conditioner and -- then she caught sight of her bandages once again, and groaned. “I can’t get these wounds wet, Prom,” she said.

“Wrap your arm in a towel? That might help keep the bandages dry.” The languid way he was levering himself up from the bed was making his robe slip off his shoulders.

Her face was burning, she knew it. She could feel it, extending down the back of her neck. “Yeah,” she said again, and she quickly bundled up her arm, and shuffled after him down the corridor. 

Past Ignis’s door, and past Gladio’s, and she was trying to walk as quietly as she could.

Prompto, too, seemed quiet, as she followed the white and pale of him: stairs, all the way down and then past the lobby level, and out where the night sky stretched out above them. A cold waxing moon staring down.

She almost reached out with her power for the daemon wards, but -- here was Prompto’s hand on her uninjured wrist, distracting her. “See that steam over there?”

She could, and they only had to round the corner, together, and she understood why this hotel was here.

“Hot springs,” she said, quietly.

“That what they’re called? They’re the best,” Prompto said.

She let him point out the showers and the changing rooms and the ancient-looking washing machine and dryer, and she was glad to peel off her shorts and her dress and all the rest of the things she was wearing -- all the way down to the plain cotton briefs because she didn’t see the point in wearing fancy lacy things out here on this road trip. 

When she unclasped her brassiere and set it aside, it was all she could do to stop herself from scratching at the ruts the thing had worn into her skin.

The sign in the shower said she needed to wash up before she got into the hot spring itself -- but she could still use the hot water that gushed from the taps, so she was happy to lather away the grime and the dust and the everything else that had matted in her hair. The rinse water ran gray for the first few moments, and she winced and shuddered and tried to ignore it.

Something was wrong with her soap, though, because running it over her skin only produced a thin scum of bubbles -- still, she was able to do a quick but thorough scrub of all the parts of herself that she could wash, and she was hurrying, now, as she stuck her soapy foot under the tap.

Soft singing coming from behind her, whatever it was that Prompto had gotten stuck in his head once again.

She didn’t recognize the washing machine, not really, so she settled for scrubbing her clothes quickly in the scant soap suds.

One more set of instructions before she could get into the hot spring: she’d need to go in naked.

And she’d seen Prompto naked, as he’d seen her naked.

That was then, however, when neither of them knew anything about this trip and where she was going and what she was actually going to have to do, which was nothing at all like what she had learned from books and from Ignis’s research.

Sometimes she thought that she’d left behind the Noctis who had been running away from her nineteenth birthday somewhere between the Hammerhead and the ferry to Altissia -- sometimes she thought she was an entirely different Noctis now, with all kinds of power running riot within her and not all of it in forms she could wrap her mind around.

But still, to look at her own naked skin, there was no change -- oh, other than her hair, which was growing longer in some places. Maybe the muscles in her own arms, from all the fights, because if he hadn’t been fighting with her swords she’d been swinging her own staff around at everything that tried to come close.

Why was she so worried?

“Just Prom,” she told herself, and snatched her hand away from the basket full of clean white robes, because she couldn’t take any of those into the hot water with her.

She wrapped her hair in a towel instead, and took a deep breath, and walked out the open door to the pool and its steam-wreathed rocks.

Walking a careful circle around the perimeter of the pool, she could see how Prompto had covered his face with a smaller towel. He must have been sitting on something, because he was only visible from above the waist, and his elbows were hitched up onto some flat smooth rocks.

“Come on in,” he said, almost drawling. “Water’s just fine. And also, I’m not looking, if you’re worried about that.”

“Maybe a little,” she said: but it was him, right? He wasn’t going to make fun of her scars. The long ones on her back were almost invisible now, but the burns and the scratches and the scrapes, and the lingering bruises from the last series of hunts, those were still pretty stark on her skin, all kinds of welts and too-smooth raised lines.

So she slipped into the water and -- gasped, as soon as she was immersed partway.

“Good?” Prompto asked.

“Y-yeah,” and she couldn’t even feel any kind of shame, since the word had come out half a moan.

He had called it being cooked from the inside out.

She called it heaven.

Already drunk on the heat that seemed to soak into her skin, she groped her way to where he was sitting, and -- there, there was a ledge beneath the water and she carefully lowered herself to sit, trying not to get burned -- the water stopped just below her throat once she had settled.

It was a little awkward that she had to hold her other arm out of the water, though.

Rippling water, beneath the surface, and maybe that was enough of a warning: when Prompto’s hand wrapped around her wrist, she just turned her hand and twined her fingers into his.

She could smell the soap he’d used, and the scent of the water itself: maybe it was the rocks getting cooked, or maybe it was just the two of them.

And that made her think of what he’d said in her room: “Soup,” she giggled, nudging Prompto. “Lucian and Nif soup.”

“Think Ignis will like the recipe?” he whispered back.

She tried to hide her laughter as it got louder and higher, but her hand was no help, not when he was holding it so tightly -- she leaned into his shoulder instead, and felt the way he was laughing, too. “Maybe Gladio would -- we’d be like noodles to him.”

“You’re terrible, Noct,” he said, still shaking.

“Maybe sometimes. But you know everyone’s scrawny next to him, right?”

She felt it when he drifted closer, so they were touching from shoulders to hips to thighs to knees.

So she slid her good arm around his waist and closed all the remaining spaces between her side and his, and sighed in relief.

The second time her eyes drifted closed, she turned so she could nuzzle the nearest part of him that she could reach, which in this case was his chest.

“You feel so nice.” She felt the words more than hearing them, rumbling gently in his skin and then passing to hers. 

“Do I?” she said, trying to hitch him closer -- an easier prospect than usual, since the water was taking their weight.

“Yeah.”

This was good, she thought, just drifting with him here, surrounded by the water, and inexplicably protected in the deep of the night.

She couldn’t even feel ticklish when she felt his hand ghost across her knee -- but she did pinch his hip, very very gently, in retaliation.

He only huffed out a ghost of a laugh in response.

How long she sat there next to him, she had no idea -- but she was starting to really feel sleepy, and her fingertips were nothing more than a mass of wrinkles, and the problem with being here was, she might actually drown if she wasn’t careful.

On the other hand: glorious glorious hot water, and all to herself, and Prompto by her side.

She didn’t want to think about him drowning.

So she had to get out.

“Prom,” she said.

“Noct,” he moaned, softly, after a moment. “Can’t feel my feet any more. I think the heat’s gone to my head.”

And she’d left all her weapons back in her room, too, so she couldn’t even take the easy way out and warp away.

The heat was inside her, was sinking into her with slow heavy fingers, and it was hard to get to her feet -- and that task was only made even more difficult by the fact that Prompto was still lolling languidly next to her.

How she managed to haul their combined weight out of the deliciously drugging lure of the water, she had no idea.

But once he was out in the cool night air again, Prompto seemed to shake himself back to full awareness. 

Watching him look between her and the water, she had to laugh, again, when he said, “Like getting smacked with some kinda bad feelings, huh.”

“I’ve never tried narcotics,” she said, “but maybe that’s what that feels like.”

“I couldn’t say, I never enjoyed it,” he said.

She felt her face fall, and she quickly threw him a robe and pulled one on, so she could wrap her arms around him. “Sorry -- did I say something insensitive?”

“I kind of started it, so -- don’t apologize,” he said.

She pushed herself up a little, just so she could aim the kiss properly, landing it on the bridge of his nose. 

“Don’t go,” she said, once they were back in her room.

“’Kay,” he said, and she fell back into her pillows, and he was a heavy warm presence by her side.

She knew she slept, knew it with the heaviness of her muscles -- but there were soft breaths behind her, ghosting just between her shoulder blades.

Her bare shoulder blades -- and she only needed to blink, and focus, to see that somehow she’d wriggled out of her robe at some point, and that explained why Prompto was breathing directly onto her skin.

Nothing uncomfortable about it -- there was some part of her mind that was urging her to lean back into him -- he’d locked the door, hadn’t he? And this was her room anyway. If the other two came in here and got an eyeful, that’d be their own fault.

So she pressed all her back against Prompto, and was rewarded with a sleepy murmur that contained her name, sweetly slurred sound.

“Wish you’d kiss me,” she whispered in response.

“Where,” he said.

That was unexpected.

She turned around, slowly.

Those eyes of his were pinning her down -- heavy-lidded gaze -- she felt her heart begin to pound.

“Thought you were still asleep,” she said, leaning forward to brush her lips against his cheek.

“I thought you wanted me to kiss you,” he said, and -- that was his hand holding her chin in place, that was him nibbling gently at the corners of her mouth, that was his tongue licking gently at her lower lip. Coaxing. Teasing.

She raised a hand to the back of his head. Not to clutch at his hair. Not to draw him in. Just for the pleasure of sifting the fine light strands through her fingers, just to feel the shape of him.

If he wanted to take his time with -- this, whatever this was going to be -- she was too relaxed from the hot spring to object.

And maybe she wanted him to take the lead, even when -- he was laughing softly as he darted in for kiss after kiss, just the barest pressure of his mouth against hers, swift and playful at the same time.

Two could play at that game, she thought, as the moments dragged on.

And here, there was no danger of doing anything funny to her bandaged arm.

What he was doing to her mouth with his, she did to his body with her hands: ghosting touches over the bits of his skin that his robe revealed to her. A circle traced around his nipple, and a nail raked gently down the center of his chest. Her thumb brushing the line of his collar bone, then resting on the pulse in his throat -- she shivered and smiled at the runaway beat of him there, hot beneath the skin.

“All right, all right, you win,” he said, but he was grinning as he quickly stripped off his robe and threw it off the bed.

She’d seen him like this any number of times, but she still wanted to look at him -- still wanted to touch him, and let him feel that she wanted him, wanted what they had between them -- that she appreciated him.

So she fought the warm heaviness in her muscles and rose up onto her knees over him.

“You look so nice up there,” he said, and she watched the muscles in his throat as he swallowed and stared at her.

“And you’re perfect to me,” she said.

She let him tug her in for a kiss: no more teasing, this time, as she worried at his lower lip with her teeth, very very gently, before licking her way into his mouth. She drew in the moan that rumbled in his chest; she sucked on his tongue for a moment before letting him take control, briefly, of the kiss. 

“Noct,” he whispered, pleading, as she moved: away from his mouth, downwards. The same dips in his skin that had been driving her crazy earlier, skin stretched taut and smooth over his muscles. She traced him with her mouth, with her tongue -- and then she locked on to the spot just below his heart where she could feel his pulse crashing through her, and bit, viciously.

“Yes!” Half a shout because her room still shared a wall with Ignis’s, but there was no mistaking the way his hands gripped her arms, flexing in silent pleading.

And still she worried at his fair skin, the bruise already rising and he’d be wearing it for a few days, which was the whole point.

Down, carefully mapping out the subtle textures of his thighs and his hips, the smell of the hot spring lingering around his knees and his ankles, the veins that stood out in his much-abused feet -- pointedly ignoring his cock that lay hard against his belly, already leaking, just a little.

“Turn over,” she demanded.

“Noct,” he said, again, hot high flush staining his cheeks and his chest -- but he didn’t just roll onto his stomach. He raised himself onto his hands and knees, too, and the muscles of his back stood out in relief as he moved.

“Beautiful, you’re so beautiful,” she whispered at the base of his spine, as she lavished his skin with love-bites.

“Tease,” he groaned, as she ran her tongue up his back.

“You like it?” she asked. She always asked, when they were doing this.

“Don’t stop,” he huffed, shivering deliciously beneath her hands.

She bit him, hard, on his shoulder, as a reward.

“Love it when you get all possessive.”

“You know you’ll get your chance,” she laughed, and she let her fingers drift down, past the cleft of his ass, towards his perineum.

He collapsed back down to the blankets with a long moan. “Let me touch you Noct please.”

“Yeah,” she said, and she fell onto her back once again, next to him.

She felt her heart skip a beat when he leaned over her, and when he pressed a kiss to her chest, right between her breasts -- and then she let out a strangled cry when he nipped at her collar bone, not enough to leave a mark but enough for her to feel his teeth.

“Good,” he asked, and nosed at her nipple, and she shivered to feel it go hard at his touch.

It was her turn to say, “Don’t stop.”

She was lost, quickly, in the feel of him suckling at her breasts, one and then the other, and then going back again for second and third rounds.

“You taste so good,” she felt him say, as he trailed open-mouthed kisses down over her stomach, down to the core of her. “Just want to eat you up.”

“Please?” she asked, little caring how strangled the word was.

That got her a soft hungry laugh, and his hands on her knees, gently pushing them apart. “I got you.”

Her world narrowed down to just him, just the way he worked her over with his mouth, the pressure of his fingers into her skin, the fire that licked along her nerves as he spurred her on and on toward that glorious peak -- 

And just as she was about to hit that edge, he stopped, and sat up, and she clenched her teeth against her frustrated wail.

“Can’t have you having all the fun,” he was teasing her.

“Prom,” she said, drawing out the sound of it.

“I’ll make it up to you right now,” he said, and leaned in. Said, softly, right next to her ear: “Ride me?”

She laughed, softly. “I’m almost tempted to say no, just to hear you scream.”

But she did as he asked, anyway, and she relished the drawn-out groan he made as she gripped his cock at the base, as she held him steady, so she could sink down onto him, slow slow slow and she threw her head back, shivering with the feel of him inside her, with the feel of his hands gripping her hips. 

“Fuck,” Prompto said, and she could see the fervent need burning in his eyes.

That was the general idea, she thought, and she snapped her hips forward --

“Yeah fuck do that, do that, _Noct_ \-- ”

And on the next stroke he met her halfway, and her eyes snapped closed, and she gave herself over to the feel of him, the slap of their skin -- she held on to his hands at her hips and kept going, harder and faster and he was whispering to her again, he was calling her name: “Come on, Noct, come on, give it to me, I want it, please -- ”

She was going to shatter, she was going to fall to pieces, and his voice was the steady point of contact with the world, and she could break, couldn’t she, she could break and be safe because it was him -- 

It was good, it was so good, and he was moaning her name again and again -- 

She caught her peak -- or perhaps it caught her, and she fell headlong over the edge, and distantly she heard Prompto cry out -- oh, he was finishing, too, and she loved it when he did that -- between her thighs she could feel the tremors wracking his body, the deep shiver of him -- 

“Come on,” he said, and she managed not to fall right onto him -- she managed to disengage, managed to reach for a corner of her own discarded robe to clean herself up, and then him.

She snuggled into his side, and rubbed her cheek against his sweat-stained skin.

“We’ll need another bath later,” he said, and she felt him trace circles on her upper arm with three fingers.

“Bath later. Sleep now,” she said.

“That’s you all over. And also, yes,” Prompto said.

She closed her eyes, and dove headlong into sleep.


	6. to walk tall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is one of the major reasons why this fic exists in the first place.

The others were already talking in a tight cluster next to the front wheel of the Regalia, and she was still sitting in the shotgun seat, looking up and up and up.

Some mountain this was supposed to be: Lesser Longwhythe, Cindy had called it -- sort of a younger sibling to the actual peak of Longwhythe itself. 

There were stories about these mountains, she knew that much from Ignis’s stories, and from the way he himself was pointing to the jagged peaks for the benefit of Prompto, she could guess what he was talking about now.

Somewhere in one of those mountains there was an Aeon to be found -- or something like it. That was all the legends had ever told her. 

Which Aeon was it?

Or what was that something else, that might be waiting here?

And why did she want to turn tail and run -- especially from the older mountain peak with its far too sharp spires?

The nights were getting colder and colder and as she got out of the car, she was grateful to huddle into the comfort of her knitted jacket, though its hems kept blowing every which way with the capricious howl of the winds.

Prompto turned to hook an arm around her waist, and bring her into their huddle, and it was warmer here, shoulder to shoulder with her companions. 

“Plan,” Gladio said, and for once there was a lot of tension in his shoulders, even with his arms crossed over his chest as usual. “We’re going to need a plan. Maybe more than one.”

“Without a detailed knowledge of what is in those mountains, we can’t really do much,” Ignis said, and he produced four lamps from nowhere, and handed them around. “The maps of these places are -- not much help, either.”

“So they’re trying to screw us over some more, what else is new.”

She hid her face, for a moment, in Prompto’s shoulder. Took a deep breath. “Guys,” she said, turning back. “Focus. One thing at a time, right? That’s what you all keep telling me. So we’re doing this one mountain at a time, and we’re doing the lesser peak first.”

“Treasure?” Ignis asked.

She shook her head. “No. Aeon.”

Even in the night she could see the worry that deepened the lines between his eyebrows. “Do you have any idea which one it might be?”

“I just keep getting an impression of rocks,” she said, honestly. “And a lot of pain.”

“That’s reassuring,” Gladio snorted.

“I know it’s not,” she said.

When Prompto took her hand, she was happy to hold on -- but she was also happy for the strength he lent her, strength enough to let her square her shoulders and keep going. “There’s no way of knowing if the other Summoners ever came this way, so we’re going to have to assume the worst: we’ll all be bleeding by the time we get to the Aeon chamber, if there actually is one, so -- now would be a good time to check if you’ve got enough room in your pockets for a few extra potions.”

“Why do you think I’m wearing these,” Prompto said, and he kicked the ground next to her, and she heard the tell-tale clinking in the many, many pockets of his trousers. 

“Remind me to thank you later,” she said, trying to smile.

“Can it, lovebirds,” Gladio said, but he was smirking when he said it.

She punched him in the elbow and got nothing more than a flash of pain in her knuckles for her efforts. But she was pleased to hear the steadiness in her own voice when she went on: “Try to pace yourselves, if you can -- just because we’re going into this one less than blind, doesn’t mean I want you to wear yourselves out trying to clear the path for me. Are we absolutely understood on that? We have to go at a steady pace. We have to be careful.”

“I never thought I would hear you telling us to take the slow path,” Ignis said, and maybe he was looking a little bit teary-eyed, a little bit proud, but she would never be so rude as to point it out.

Gladio was shaking his head, with a slight hint of a genuine smile. “First time for everything, she said.”

There was a long, long cry in the distance, high and eerie and piercing.

“No more time to stay out here,” Prompto said, his free hand already at his other hip.

“Agreed,” she said, and she grabbed Gladio’s hand in both of hers, and poured a little of her power into him, just enough to strengthen the link that already existed, tied to the ring he wore on his arm. 

“Thanks Noct,” he said, gruff as he turned away and flashed a long blade into existence, something that almost reminded her of Cor Leonis. 

Reaching out to Ignis’s shoulders, she whispered, “Don’t kill yourself clearing the way for me. I mean it.”

“I will not. I give you my word.” Eyes still bright, he turned away, with the knives that had been passed to him by Nyx Ulric sparking suddenly in the night.

Before she could look Prompto in the eyes he was already swooping in for a kiss -- and brief though it was, she felt warm afterwards, warm enough that she could almost forget the desert night. 

“Stay with me,” she said, “just, watch my back.”

“You never have to ask,” he said.

And there, there in his hand was his gun, and she watched him look it over and make sure it was ready for hard use -- only a moment, and he was striding away from her, as well.

Leaving her to look up at the stars in the night, and to say the prayer she had been hearing in the back of her mind all along: “Give me the strength to be strong. Give me the strength to walk tall.”

Stray thought crossing her mind: Luna holding on to her staff and saying a prayer, in the one and only place where they had forged a path to the Aeon chamber, side by side.

Luna’s prayer was different, however: “Give me the strength to cast out pain. Give me the strength to find the light.”

Noctis said that prayer, too, and maybe it was effective, because when she pulled her staff from the blue flame of her power, it was wound with an extra ribbon, broad white with a long streak of gold running down the middle.

And she dashed past the others, warped straight to the spot where the map had indicated there would be a passage into the lesser peak -- there it was, with the seal of the Summoners placed upon it, half-eroded in a niche in the old dark-red rock.

“Let me,” Ignis said, and she watched him throw a signal flare into the dark shadows ahead.

Skittering screeching wailing, that the evil echoes of the mountain seemed to amplify until she thought her heart would shred to pieces.

“I can do this,” she said. “I can do this.”

She looked back, once, and smiled.

And Ignis was running past her, and she was hurtling forward in his wake, and she was already casting as fast as she could even before he could turn the first corner, fire and lightning leaping from her fingertips -- 

Prompto’s voice, steady as he called out targets: “Gladio, down and to your left -- Iggy! Duck! -- Noct, right corridor, light ’em up!”

When the corridor broadened and they were suddenly standing in a massive arch of a cave, Noctis screamed her challenge to the mountain itself, and she clenched her free hand, and the blade of the Katana of the Warrior seemed to blaze in the flames that she was still calling forth -- and up, up, she was propelling herself high into the rockbound darkness and when gravity seized her and dragged her down, she landed in a whirl of sword and staff and the magic that burned through her, clearing a huge swath of daemons with every step, with every swing -- 

So many enemies here, forcing them to stick together: close enough for all of them to touch, as she darted into and out of the fight. Here she threw a fireball into the daemon that was gnashing its teeth at Prompto. Here she ran her sword through the oversized dark blob that was roaring towards Gladio. Here she was casting lightning onto Ignis’s blades as he dispatched another series of enemies.

Passion running high and hot in her as she cast around for the next series of passages, as she shouted and the others were homing in on her as she dashed up and up the steep slope, enough that she was halfway to winded when they reached a sort of landing, and there in the stone at her very feet were engraved lines and something very much like writing -- 

“Cover me,” she snapped, and she heard Gladio yell something, heard the booming reports of Prompto’s gun, as she dropped to her knees.

Ignis bent over her shoulder, providing her with extra light. “I can read that part at least,” he said, pointing to one of the worn sections. “Two paths. Two chambers?”

“Not possible to have two Aeons in the same place,” she said. “This isn’t where the Sister-Mages live, and they were the only exception to the rule.”

“How do we know which chamber is the one with the Aeon?”

As hard as she tried to think -- she had no answers for him.

She seized his hand. “I -- we’ll have to go into both of them.”

“You will. But -- the danger,” he said.

“It’s got to be done.” She reached into the heart of her power and pulled out a string of potions -- bright blue, each one, and she winced as she pulled the first cork out, and poured all the liquid down her throat. 

The restorative tasted like flames, and she swallowed it down as fast as she could, and the next, and the next, until she had finished the half-dozen and now she could feel her magic shrieking and sharp beneath her skin, threatening to burst out of her.

She made the potion bottles vanish, as well as her sword, then turned to Ignis. Laid her now-freed hand on his head. “I can spare a little more, just to protect you,” she said. “Get the others here.”

“I -- ”

“Do it,” she commanded.

“ -- Yes.”

Gladio was drenched in sweat, and he’d lost his shirt again, and she couldn’t restore it; Prompto was limping, a little, and she saw Ignis break a healing potion over his leg even as she was casting her protection over him.

“Come on,” she said, and they dashed up the path once again, winding up and up until it started to plunge and now suddenly they were descending into the depths of the mountain itself -- maybe into the very earth, and she tried not to panic as they went deeper and deeper -- and there was only one path, here, which both confirmed her suspicions and made her even more afraid -- 

The path branched at last.

Here were the familiar crystals that burned in their niches, and it was easy to find the pattern that would build the barrier between them and everything else that was in this mountain -- the barrier that would protect only this crossing. Anyone within the barrier would be safe from the daemons -- but the barrier would also prevent the people within from advancing with her.

“I’ll take the left-hand chamber first,” she said.

“First?” Gladio said. “Two chambers?”

“And I have to enter them both.”

“Not two Aeons.”

“Let me explain,” Ignis said, and did so, in rapid whispers.

Gladio’s brows drew ever closer and closer together with worry.

“Noct,” Prompto said.

She touched her forehead to his. “I don’t know why I need to do it like this -- all I know is that I have to. This is -- this is part of what I have to do.”

“You can’t leave us,” he whispered, fervently. 

“I don’t plan to,” she said. “I especially don’t plan to leave you.”

“Come back,” he said, and kissed her.

And she backed out of the barrier -- heard the great roar of the mountain itself as she took the first step onto the path that only a Summoner could take -- the barrier shimmered, once, and went opaque, and now the sight of them was gone from her, too.

She turned around, and lifted her head, and held on to her staff with both hands.

The voice, the voice in the back of her head -- it wasn’t her voice after all, as she had been thinking -- but it sounded so similar to hers -- 

Nothing on the left-hand path with her except the great jagged teeth of crystals, and they were almost familiar, almost the same pulsing colors and fire as the stone in the Ring of the Lucii -- 

“Who goes there?!”

Hearing that voice was like being smashed down to the ground -- she fell to her knees, felt the world swirl out of sight and vanish into muted crystalline hues -- 

Before the darkness could take her, she thought, anguished, of the others, and she made herself pray, once again: 

_Give me the strength to be strong. Give me the strength to walk tall._

*

How long was she drifting? How long had she been knocked out?

And who else was saying that prayer?

Noctis opened her eyes and -- 

“No!”

The long gallery in the Citadel! The throne room, its roof blasted wide open! Rubble beneath her feet and all around her, the niches and the statues destroyed!

She clenched her hands into fists and willed something, anything, to appear in her hand -- and she almost fell to her knees again, when her fingers closed on a tall white staff. At the very tip of it was a crystalline globe and a single wing.

At the other end of the gallery -- was not her father’s throne.

And now she was running, she was being made to run, and the thing that was glowing in place of the throne of the Lucii was -- 

“No,” she whispered.

“No, no,” and she stopped herself from reaching out to touch the Crystal -- the very Crystal that sustained the Walls around Insomnia.

And there was something inside the Crystal, a shape that was almost human, a shape that was nearly familiar -- a shape that reminded her of -- 

“Father?” she said.

The shadow within the Crystal seemed to turn, and to drift closer -- until there was a hand coming out of those smooth walls, groping blindly -- 

Noctis stepped aside, almost straight off the dais --

The Crystal was gone, and in its place was her father’s throne -- and the man who sat on that throne.

Fine strands of gray ran through his dark hair, which lay long and unkempt against his cheeks, catching on the rough stubble of his beard. Tear-tracks still carving down to his stern mouth -- and there was something terribly familiar about him, as though she were looking at herself in a cracked mirror -- 

“You’re not -- Regis,” she whispered, though she kept thinking of the lines of pain in her father’s face.

Recognition shook through her when she saw the scars in his face, the scars left behind by painful magic, too much power raging through a mortal vessel, consuming it -- 

“Regis is my father,” the man said. He was wearing a sharp dark suit, all sleek lines -- and there was an all-too-familiar ring on his finger. 

“No,” she said, and the sight of the ring on his hand made her feel -- wrong. Things were going wrong. “Regis only had one child. Regis Lucis Caelum -- he’s my father.”

The man’s glare seemed to cut through her. “Regis never had a bastard.”

“I am _not_ a bastard,” she snapped. “I’m his heir. I’m the Princess. Noctis Lastella Lucis Caelum.”

The man blinked.

His mouth hung open on the one word: “What?”

She took a step back, and prepared to swing the staff at him. “Who are you, and why are you sitting on that throne?”

“Because -- because it’s mine. I -- I’m Noctis. Noctis Lucis Caelum.”

It was her turn to say, “What?”

“I was in the Crystal. Sleeping. It pulled me in,” the man said, and was it a trick of the light? His features seemed to be growing softer, younger, less ground-down.

No. She blinked and he was still -- as he was when she had seen him step out of the Crystal.

“You’re Noctis. _I’m_ Noctis,” she said. “Are you -- ”

“You’re me,” he said. “Or I am you.”

“How -- ” She cast back to what she had learned at the end of each of her Summoner’s Trials. The knowledge that there were other worlds, some like hers and some very different, and all the histories were different from each other because different decisions were made, or because there were different outcomes for every decision -- “There are other worlds like Eos,” she breathed.

“I came from Eos,” the man who was also Noctis said. “It’s being torn apart by the Starscourge.”

“I don’t know what that is,” she said. “I am -- I have been ordered to perform the great task that has been given to me by the Astrals. I’m a Summoner.” The sharp harsh laugh burst from her before she could think of holding it back. “I’m a tragedy in the making. Just waiting to die.”

Something darkened in the man’s face. “Who told you you were going to die?”

“The Astrals. That makes it true, right?” She laughed again -- and then coughed -- harsh copper taste on her tongue and she whirled away, and spat blood onto the carpet beneath her feet.

When she turned back to him, he was holding out a handkerchief to her. “You’re not all right.”

“I’m just fine,” she snapped, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m just -- I’ve been fighting. I’m hurt, I think. The last potions I took were all for my magic. Healing’s for the others, they need it more than I do.”

“You have companions, too,” the man said.

She tried to smile. “Yeah. They chose to go with me. I told them they didn’t have to bind themselves to my path. But stupid good men, all of them. They asked to go on my path. And I’m glad they’re with me.”

The man did smile, then, though it went away nearly as quickly as it had come. “I miss my friends. They were -- they’re still out there, I think, while I’m here in the Crystal. I hope they make it through to the end of the night. I -- I’m going to need them, I think, one more time, before it’s all over for me.”

“Is that it?” Noctis swayed, then, and caught herself on one of the crumbling railings, and the man reached out to take her wrist and lead her down to the floor.

He sat next to her. She watched him as he looked up at the throne that he had vacated.

“If you’re me, and if I’m you,” he said, “we must have the same friends.”

“Ignis, Gladio, Prompto,” she said. 

And she placed her hand over her heart.

The man made the same gesture, his hand over his heart. “Yeah. They’re the best of me.”

She nodded. “And -- I’m lucky. So lucky. I have them to watch out for me. And I can’t stop myself from watching out for them. From trying to protect them. I left them in a barriered room -- I have to hope they’re safe. I have to get back there, so I can tell them I’m okay.” She sighed. “I just want to live in peace. I just want to wake up next to Prompto, every morning. But -- this thing,” and she shook the staff that she held in her hand, that she now knew was the Scepter of the Pious. “This great task I’ve got to do. I -- it sucks, do you know that?”

The man’s laugh, when it came out of him, sounded like it was being ripped to pieces. “I do, actually. I know it sucks. I know how much it sucks.”

The more she looked at the bitter grin that was fixed onto his mouth, the more her heart hurt.

“You were the voice that was whispering to me,” she said, after a while. “That prayer, the one about walking tall. I started saying it, and it was you who was saying it all along in my head.”

“You’re probably right,” he said. “That prayer -- it’s all I’ve got to hang on to. I don’t know how many years I’ve spent, already, sleeping in the Crystal. The night is supposed to last for ten years. I don’t suppose you could tell me how long it’s been.”

“Not my Eos,” she said.

“No, you’re right, it’s not yours. It’s mine. And it’s mine to save, but -- it’s a long damned wait.”

She dared, then, and took his hand.

When he wrapped his fingers around hers she felt the charge run through them, like an exchange of her strength with his.

And she saw, dimly, through his eyes, the horrors he’d lived through.

“I -- I can’t -- ” she said, after she could think through the shock. “They never even prepared you for what you had to do.”

“It was not part of the plan,” he said, bitterly. 

“That’s fucked up,” she declared. “What was done to you -- you were just screwed over is what was done to you.”

“Yes.” 

When he looked over at her again, she was taken aback to see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “But you. You were sneering at the Astrals earlier. There’s a plan, in the back of your mind. You try to avoid thinking about it, but -- you’re planning something, aren’t you.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then: “Okay, maybe it makes sense and it doesn’t, that you know about it already, but then maybe because you’re me. I’m you. Whatever.” She shrugged, one-shouldered. “I do have a plan.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said.

She shook her head, a little. “It’d be unfair to tell you. You never even had a chance to make a plan of your own. You were just -- sent out to die, you and your -- our -- family line. I was also sent out to die, because apparently that’s what Summoners do, but -- at least I was given an opportunity to plan. And even if my plan doesn’t work -- at least I had it.”

When she looked over at him, he was weeping, quietly, both hands pressed over his face.

“Noctis,” she said, and it was strange to say her own name to someone else.

“Come here,” she said, and she raised her hand to put it on his shoulder -- but he was faster, and she blinked and found herself wrapped in his arms.

“You are strong,” he was whispering. “So strong. I can feel your determination. I can feel your power.”

“It’s your power, now, too,” she said, as she held him in turn. 

“Is it?” He let her go, after a moment.

She had a chance to smile at him, and brush away a little of his tears. “You felt it earlier.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“It’s there, in you, even when -- you’re sleeping. In the Crystal. It’ll still be there when you wake up.”

“I would like that,” he said. “And what about you -- what about your plan -- ”

“Now that I know what you’ve been through -- I can’t keep my plan secret any more, can I? Not from the guys, and -- more importantly, not from the Astrals.” She smiled, baring all her teeth. “Time to tell the Astrals what’s what. Yeah?”

It was difficult to get to her feet, when she could still smell her own blood on her own skin. 

Noctis rose, as well, and when he turned to face the throne she did the same. 

As they watched, the throne began to change into the Crystal once again.

“This dream is almost over,” he said.

“It was a good dream, maybe,” she said.

He laughed, and it was a real one, this time. “Yes. It was a good dream, because you were here.”

“And it was a good dream for me because you were here,” she said. “And -- you know something?”

“What,” he said, as he let her go, as he reached out for the Crystal.

“You helped me,” she said. “I would never be able to do what you’ve done. But you’ve convinced me, Noctis. When I get back out there -- I’ll fight to the death for everything I want. For you, and for myself.”

“Don’t do it for me, Noctis,” he said, and the lines in his face were a little lighter for his laugh. “Do it for yourself. For your life. For your heart. And I will follow your example. I will try to be as strong as you are now.”

“Goodbye,” she said, as he shivered into light and was drawn into the Crystal, away from her. “Goodbye, until we meet again.”

She heard the echoes of his last words only when he had completely vanished:

“Walk tall -- sister.”

“Walk tall, brother,” she said, and collapsed before the Crystal.

*

She woke, and blinked.

This was not the left-hand room, or the left-hand path, for that matter.

Because there was the barrier, behind her, and it was no longer opaque -- it just held, and the others were there, watching her -- 

And she was lying on the path between the men in the barrier and a tall, worn stone.

The name engraved on the stone, in the letters that only she could read, was _Anima_.

She got to her feet and -- staggered, and she touched her hand to her side and her fingertips came away wet with her own blood.

So she touched the stone with those bloodied fingertips.

The chamber rumbled and groaned -- and from the stone rose a woman-shape. Her face was veiled. Her wings were made of sharp four-sided shapes. 

_You carry enough suffering for two souls,_ the Aeon said.

Noctis held back her sob with nothing but her willpower. “I do. Will you aid me in my quest?”

_Can you be strong enough to carry your suffering and mine?_

She stood tall. “The only way to know is to find out,” and she opened her arms.

The Aeon wailed, once, and collapsed into blue and gold light -- that rushed into her.

Noctis screamed. 

And -- held.

For the man in the crystal, she thought.

For herself.

And she turned back to the others.

The barriers fell and Prompto rushed towards her, and he was there to catch her when she swayed and sank to her knees -- 

She seized his collar in her bloody hand and pulled him into a kiss -- then she beckoned Gladio in, too, and kissed his cheek, and Ignis, on his forehead.

“I have a plan, guys,” she said, and grinned, and the tears fell hot and fast from her eyes.


	7. we help the helpless

Blue feathers rippling in her face as she bent low to the neck of her chocobo, as she dug her heels gently into its sides, urging more speed and yet even more.

Thunder of another chocobo on the run, and a glimpse of bright red feathers, just behind her: she knew who was riding on her heels.

On, over the rough rocks and the slippery moss, deeper and deeper into the trackless forest and she trusted her chocobo to know the way: but she couldn’t stop herself from flailing at the reins when it let out a piercing cry and leaped across a gorge. Only a glimpse of the raging river at the bottom, and she didn’t want to think about what could have happened if the chocobo had _missed_ its landing -- 

Prompto, behind her, let out a shocked strangled cry -- but the echoes of that cry, sharp and high, told her that he and his mount had crossed safely, and were still racing behind her.

On, until finally and suddenly her chocobo shied and skittered off the course that it seemed to have been charting, coming to a juddering stop -- Noctis threw herself from the saddle and stroked its neck, firm and soothing. Said, quietly, “Smell danger?”

 _Kweh,_ was the response, high and reedy with fear.

“This is where we get off, then,” she said, and she turned to throw her arms out and Prompto’s eyes went wide with shock as he yanked on the reins of his mount, skidding aside just at the last moment to avoid riding her down.

Once he was able to steady himself and his chocobo, he bounded to her side and peered at the wreck of the beacon that she’d produced from her pocket. “It was destroyed near here?” he asked, quietly.

“Yeah, see the color of the soil over there,” she whispered, and pointed to a heap of trampled plants. 

“Same as the dust inside the beacon,” he said. “So we’re close.”

She let him edge away to crouch next to the torn and scattered leaves, and she was still close enough to touch him, when the color drained away from his face, so she could see his freckles far too clearly. “Talk to me,” she said.

“Claws. Big ones.” He was pointing to the deep gouges in the roots and in the soil. “More than enough to take a full-grown chocobo down. And there are -- there are a lot of those tracks, Noct.”

“No point putting our mounts in the line of fire,” she said, and she produced a silver-colored whistle from another pocket, and blew three short sharp blasts on it.

Flurry of feathers as her mount, and Prompto’s, dashed away from them.

“Okay. So. You and me against -- beasties,” he said, taking her hand for a moment.

“Remember we’re doing this to save the black one,” she said.

“As if I could forget -- I dragged you along on this one after all. And now I gotta keep you safe. I don’t want to think about all the ways Ignis and Gladio will kick my ass if anything happens to you now.”

She grinned, and shook her head. “You asked me. I went along with you. And now: hush.” 

“Lead me,” he murmured, and blew her a kiss before dropping into a crouch and drawing his gun.

That was a good idea, she thought, and she thought of training with a crossbow under the stern eyes of both Cor and Clarus, and she drew a plain one from the arsenal that rested within her, with a wickedly barbed quarrel already nocked for use.

Beneath the trees it was eerily silent, and in her short experience of adventuring thus far, that silence was never a good sign.

She warped ahead: once, twice -- and when she caught a glimpse of scales and tails and _too many teeth_ she bit her lip, hard enough to draw blood, and flashed back to Prompto’s side. Caught the sleeve of his jacket in her fist and drew him away with her, up into the trees and safety, to a thick-boled branch high above.

“Sahagin,” she hissed.

“Ugh,” he said, and extended his arm. As she watched him sight in, she only just remembered to cover her ear, the one that was closer to the gun -- 

Bang, and below, one of the creatures dropped dead -- and the rest flew into a frenzy, into a blind stampede -- 

“I’ll lead them away,” she said. “You find the egg.”

“Noct,” he said, half a warning. 

“Trust me?”

“I always do. But -- be careful.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she drew one of her knives, and hurled it into the forest, away from the sahagin, away from the tree that Prompto was crouching in -- and she vanished after the knife, pursuing it only to land with a deliberate crash in a hollow of densely fallen leaves and -- bones, those were picked-over bones --

Fear hammering in her heart as she wrenched her gaze away, and cried out, “Hey, uglies, over here!”

Slithering scampering skittering heading her way -- 

She leveled her crossbow on the first sahagin to emerge from the forest, and fired -- 

And hot on its heels, at least a dozen more of the creatures -- 

As they came closer she fired off three more shots -- each quarrel finding its mark -- and then she tossed the crossbow over her shoulder, and drew the next weapon, a silver-hafted spear.

“Come and get some!” she yelled, and she let herself blur into motion, warping into and out of the roaring rearing masses of reptilian flesh, striking and stabbing and dancing around the entire length of the spear as she played it out, around and around. The spear was multiple weapons, after all: heavy club of a pommel to counter the gleaming-sharp length of the blade-end, and a ribbon, fluttering, distracting.

A crashing run bearing down on her, and a voice that she knew: “Behind you!”

And Prompto became the steady point in the world that she whirled around, that she trusted: he wouldn’t fire at her, not now, not ever, not even as she continued to strike and strike and strike again --

Teeth, closing in on her leg -- 

Noctis screamed, and threw the spear straight up into the air, and flashed upwards after it, taking her out of the line of Prompto’s fire, and she could almost see the bullets as he fired, fired, fired again -- four shots in all, and that last sahagin died with the furious echoes of its death-cry shaking the leaves all around -- 

She landed, and the crossbow was back in her hands, and she felt Prompto’s back touch her own, the two of them shoulder to shoulder and turning, carefully, scanning the undergrowth for anything else that might be on the attack --

But the sounds of the forest slowly began to filter in around them: distant birdsong and the swift frightened patter of prey’s feet, here and there until the darkness seemed to lift.

“Think we got everything,” she heard him say, after a moment.

“Let’s see what we can find,” she said. “And -- you found anything?”

“Nest,” he said.

And she loped after him, trusting him to show her the way.

Until he stopped in a clearing not very far from where they’d taken shelter in the trees, and she wheeled around, sharply, until she caught sight of the faint gleam of something that was almost alive.

Tucked into a drooping thicket of fronds was a chocobo egg, the black of the shell spackled with golden fragments.

He stooped over it, and laid a tentative hand over the pointed peak. “Still warm.”

“It won’t stay warm for long,” she said, thinking of the informative posters scattered around the Wiz Chocobo Post. “We’ll need to get it to safety as fast as we can.”

“Can you warp when you’re riding a chocobo?” he asked, and he even looked entirely serious.

She shook her head. “I tried that, when I was younger, with a puppy. Living things that are -- not human -- they can’t handle it. Warping puts too much of a strain on them.”

Luna’s puppy: was it Umbra or Pryna she’d tried to take along with her on an ill-advised warp? It was only pure foolish luck that she hadn’t managed to kill the poor thing -- as it was, the puppy had growled at her for weeks afterwards, no matter how many treats she tried to offer it.

“It was worth a shot,” Prompto said, in the here and now, and she watched him take off his jacket. “Wrap it up?”

“Yeah,” and she wished she had more dress material to tear away, in order to protect the chocobo egg.

She settled for holding it close as she whistled for their mounts to reappear, and she vaulted into the saddle of the blue chocobo -- then threw the reins across to Prompto once he was mounted. “You drive,” she said.

“Good idea,” he said.

She couldn’t help but croon to the egg she held in her arms: “You’re safe, we’ve got you.”

The way back to the post took longer because Prompto didn’t want to risk the safety of the egg with any more ill-advised leaps, but seeing the lights, seeing the familiar lit-up signs, made it all worth it.

“Where have you been?” 

She slid gently down from her chocobo, and turned toward the thunderclouds gathering on Ignis’s brow. “We took a mission from Wiz.”

“And you didn’t wait for us?”

“Hey, don’t bite her head off -- we looked for you,” Prompto was saying, as he stepped up to her side. “We didn’t exactly have a lot of time though.”

She unwrapped the chocobo egg partway. “Scold us all you want later -- right now, this egg’s going to lose its chance to hatch if we delay it any more.”

He looked taken aback. “A black chocobo egg? I -- I’ve only ever heard of them.”

“We couldn’t find the mother,” Prompto said, quiet and mournful.

“Wiz is over there.” And Gladio was stepping out of the nearby caravan.

Noctis narrowed her eyes at two things: one, the fact that Gladio was actually wearing long sleeves, and two, the deep bruise that rode the collar of his shirt.

If they’d been here on the post all this time, there was no way for them to get into some kind of fight.

So that bruise had to have come from -- something else.

She cut her eyes in Ignis’s direction -- but there was no getting around the man’s smooth face.

The weight of the egg reminded her of her priorities, however, and she hurried in the direction that Gladio had pointed out: and there was Wiz, peering at a slip of paper in his hand -- that he quickly tucked away when he caught sight of her, and of her burden.

“You found it?” he asked, and she nodded, quickly.

“We had to kill a pack of sahagin to find it,” she said. “I don’t know if they hurt the mother. If they got her.” She bit her lip again. “She wasn’t anywhere nearby.”

“That’s a real shame -- but there’s this egg. We can focus on it. And you kept it warm, that’s good,” Wiz said. “I knew I could count on you.”

“We’re pushovers for chocobos, my friend and I,” she said, and she passed over the egg, and held on to Prompto’s jacket.

“Friend,” Wiz said, with a quiet chuckle. “Not so I don’t believe you, brave lass, but perhaps you’re not friends with that young man of yours -- or should I say, you’re more than just friends, hmm?”

“You might say so,” Ignis said, from just behind her.

Noctis made a face at him over her shoulder. “Traitor.”

The only warning she had of the hard breeze was the whistle of the chocobo-shaped vane perched atop the restaurant, and then -- cold, cold, cold! She’d gotten out of the sahagin fight without a scratch, but here was the wind, now, raking its claws against her arms and her legs -- 

Gloved hands plucking the jacket from her, and then draping it over her shoulders.

“Until you can get yours,” Prompto said, when she raised an eyebrow at him.

She could fit into his jacket just fine, but she needed to roll up the sleeves several times.

And then she made the mistake of taking a deep breath, because now she could smell _Prompto_ , warm and vital and musky, and she really, really wanted that scent of him to linger on her own skin.

She stepped closer to him, instead, pressing her shoulder and arm into his.

“I’ll take this egg off to a safe place, shall I,” Wiz said. “And when you and your young man are ready, come into the restaurant: I’ll make up something for you. My thanks for your help.”

“We know when we’re not wanted,” Gladio chuckled, after Wiz had hurried off. “Come on, Ignis. You want me to make dinner?”

“Absolutely not, if it’s cup noodles,” was the dry reply. 

“I promise it won’t be.”

Next to her, Prompto tried to muffle his laugh with his free hand, but it ran through her anyway. “You meant for that to sound really dirty, right?”

And she couldn’t help but giggle, and she hid it in the borrowed jacket, and she could almost swear that Ignis smiled back -- but then he was turning sharply on his heel, and heading for the Regalia. “Stay on the post tonight, the two of you.”

“Have fun,” she laughed, wiggling her fingers at Ignis’s and Gladio’s retreating backs.

When Prompto kissed her cheek, she tilted her head at him for a moment, and then kissed him back. “What was that for?”

“You know, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I woke up this morning and thought, I wanted to take you on a date.”

“We’ve got time,” she said as she grabbed his hand, as she kissed his knuckles. “And Wiz said he’d give us dinner.”

“Why don’t we talk about my ideas over dinner,” he said.

And: “Keep the jacket for a bit. Please?”

She grinned. “Couldn’t get the other one anyway, I left it in the back seat.”

“Sweet,” he said. “Sweet like you.”

And she laughed, and laughed, when the sandwiches that awaited them in a quiet corner of the post’s restaurant were followed by a quivering fluffy cheesecake, with sugar sprinkled on top in the image of a chocobo.

Prompto held her hand all throughout the meal.

Fortunately it was easy to eat sandwiches and cake with one hand.

And it was easy to taste Prompto, every time she kissed him, even through the lingering flavors of crumbed bread and crumbed cake.

*

Sharp chime of an incoming text message, just as she was fighting off her yawns, in the last few moments of her watch in the night.

_Egg hatched! Reckon I’ll call her Stella -- by your leave, of course._

Strange, how the happy news made tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

And she went in to wake Prompto up for his watch, passing him her phone as she settled into his sleeping bag.

“He’s going to name her after you,” he whispered, sweetly excited. “You’ll let him, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, around a small sob.

He didn’t ask her why she was crying -- he just kissed the top of her head. “We’ll visit her later, if I have to hold a gun to Ignis’s head so he’ll drive us there.”

“I don’t think he’s going to need convincing,” Noctis said, and she went to sleep with a smile, and with her happy tears.


	8. spirit dreams inside

She hurt.

Everything hurt.

She was more than used to the taste of blood on her tongue, heavy and cloying and gritty where it got caught between her teeth, where it lodged in her cheek. She was more than used to the dead weight of her own limbs. She was more than used to her vision going blurry, the world fading out around her in flashing silent lights in the corners of her eyes, the prelude to falling into the black.

Most of the time, there was someone waiting next to her to open her eyes, and -- that was a good thing, wasn’t it? It meant that there were people in the world who might worry for her. People in the world who might care that she existed. People in the world who wanted her to -- get up, and keep going, and fight her way past whatever it was that had caused her to fall in the first place.

(But she kept falling, kept failing, and until how long would those people stay with her?

(How long before they would see her to the actual end of her own path, the actual dead end of it, and that was even a literal thing, because as far as she knew, every Summoner had died at the end of the road, and she still didn’t know what she was going to do, now that she was being chased by a ravenous snowstorm in her dreams, a snowstorm that walked past her with closed eyes and dark hair flowing into icy white -- )

There were people in the world to pick her up when she fell.

But how many times was she going to fall, and need to be picked up again?

How many times was she going to be thrown down, before all of this was over?

How many times was she going to be so tired and so hurt and --

She was dreaming, now, and she was sure of it: because home lay months and months behind her, and yet -- here she was, standing in a square of torn and cracked stones and beautiful statues crumbled into dust. Here she was in the square where her father had raised a toast to her health, and no one stood in it who was alive.

And, crawling in on all sides, in all their sizes and in all their teeth and claws and blood-dark eyes, in all their inhuman voices raising the horrifying wail, consuming everything in their path, leaving behind nothing but broken and reeking death -- the daemons, the daemons that were even now making their foul nests and roosts in the city of her birth, the city of her own blood and her own breath -- 

She couldn’t see anyone else that was still human, or at least not-daemon -- couldn’t see anything else that was still actually alive around her.

And the pain that screamed in her skin, that tore at her guts, was growing -- it was growing, it was doubling and doubling, it was too much and -- it was going to tear her apart, it was going to make her fly to pieces, and something was crawling and shifting in her hands, in her shoulders, in her back, and she fell to her knees and screamed, and she couldn’t hear her own voice, she could feel the grating pain in her throat and something was tearing its way out of her and she was screaming _and no sound was coming out --_

She fell to her hands and knees, and coughed, sharp claws digging into her lungs, and when she looked down her own blood was dripping onto the stones, black in the night, shining malevolently up at her -- 

The world exploded into lurid red, unraveling, and the daemons, the daemons were coming --

“Help me,” she tried to say, and she was still silent, she was still voiceless --

Death was hurtling towards her on ravening teeth and claws -- 

She had failed.

Failed her city, and her ancestors, and her father. 

Failed her family, failed her friends.

Failed herself.

And the last thing she knew, she was weeping, silently, weak and fallen at last, the last of the Lucii --

Noctis opened her eyes, and shivered, in the terrible breathless aftermath of the dream that was somehow so much more than a dream.

Soft worried groan from close by, and a strange weight on her feet.

She let out a small sob, and forced herself to sit up -- half expecting her own blood spreading onto the sheets, onto the blankets that were piled onto her -- all she felt was the wet of her tears dripping from the corners of her eyes, running past her temples to pool on the pillow -- how long had she been crying? Why was she still crying? Surely she’d exhausted all her tears by now, and this road of hers still stretched and stretched forth before her, agony warping and wracking her every step -- 

The weight on her feet shifted so she could move.

Something alive. Something unmistakably alive, if the thump of that great lashing tail was any indication. Ears pricked up into wary points. Night-dark eyes. That burning furnace of warmth, and the huge heartbeat that throbbed through her, not hers at all. 

Dire wolf.

Noctis reached out, tentatively, to the gray and white fur and the wolf whimpered, and heaved itself off her feet. Padded around the edge of the bed and put his front paws onto her arm.

She knew that look in his eyes. Concern, on a wolf’s face.

She blinked, and whispered, “Umbra?”

Wet swipe of a tongue along her wrist. 

“What are you even doing here,” she began -- 

Creak, went the door, and she cried out, and tried to roll off the bed -- but a sharp pain ripped up her side and she gasped in a painful breath, another, and again that blank dreaded flash of light, blinding -- and where were her weapons, where were her knives, if she couldn’t access her own powers then where were the blades that she carried as her last resort -- 

She saw that light moving towards her, and she crossed her hands over her face, all but whimpering -- “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die like this -- ”

“Hellfire -- Noctis! Easy, easy, it’s me! Don’t fight me!”

Arms, wrapping around her.

But not to bear her down.

Not to tear her apart.

“Hush, hush, safe, you’re safe. Breathe, Noctis, breathe, I need you to breathe -- ”

Arms, holding her close, and Noctis fought to do as she’d been told, fought to calm down the mad runaway panic of her heart -- 

Umbra groaned again.

And Noctis looked up into steel-blue eyes, into limp blonde hair, wavy where its usual braids had been torn away -- bandages, too, wrapped around that pale throat and one of the arms gently encircling her.

Disbelief thundered through her as she whispered, “Luna?”

“Yes, it’s me, it’s Luna,” was the reply, in the same quiet whispers. “I didn’t know you were going to wake up, or I would have been in here, waiting for you. Or I would have tried to wake one of the others -- you shouldn’t wake alone, or to an unfamiliar face.”

“You are not unfamiliar,” Noctis said -- and took both of Luna’s hands in her own. “You are my friend. You are my sister.” She glanced at Umbra, who was padding away, just to cross the room and lie down next to the door.

“And you’re my sister, and -- well, here we are now.” Luna was biting her lip. “Are you all right? Or -- no, that was a stupid question. I meant to say, what hurts you now? I can -- I have a little more strength, and I can help you -- ”

Noctis shook her head, slowly. Reached out to touch a frayed hank of golden hair. “From where I’m sitting, you look like you need to rest, too. Or at least sleep. I -- Luna, what the hell, why do you look like that. Who do we need to kill now?”

“No killing, not yet.” The laugh that fell from Luna’s mouth was wounded, and too sharp to be really amused. “Not until we know exactly what we’re doing. And -- do I look that bad?”

Noctis gave her a blank look. “Want me to start counting? I mean -- your hair. You were so proud of it. And now it’s all, all,” and she was lost for words, then, and she waved her hand weakly. “Fucked up.”

“Yes, well, that happens when you get your backside completely kicked.”

“Don’t I know that feeling,” Noctis muttered.

“Scoot over,” Luna said, after a minute.

The bed was somehow large enough to hold both her and Luna, but it was still a tight fit: and for some reason Luna insisted on boxing her in, pinning her almost to the wall.

But Noctis couldn’t mind, not when it meant she could hold Luna close, and in that embrace she vowed a very messy vengeance on whoever or whatever had left her friend trembling in her arms. 

Was Luna sobbing? Noctis didn’t notice. 

Noctis wasn’t planning to tell anyone.

She only offered Luna a corner of the blanket to wipe her face with. “Sorry,” she said. “I had a handkerchief at some point. But either I lost it or I used it.”

“How they used to scold us for getting dust on our pretty little laces and frills,” Luna said, shaky as she blew her nose. “And now I’ve gone and done this. I just -- sorry, Noctis, I got snot on your blankets.”

“Don’t care,” Noctis said, thickly.

“My old nursemaid would have thrown an actual fit.”

“I remember her.”

She ran her fingertips through the ruin of Luna’s hair, one more time. “You really need to do something about this. I can help you wash it, or -- I might still have a brush somewhere, I can fix it a little,” she offered, quietly. “And if I don’t have one, then I’ll still use my hands.”

“I’ll worry about it later,” Luna said. “You asked me a question, and you -- you need a lot of answers. And once you’ve got your answers maybe you can help me look for mine.”

Noctis sighed, and sat up. Shifted so that she was sitting sideways on to the head of the bed, with her back propped up against the wall, and her legs crossed. “Get comfortable?”

“Yes,” and she waited for Luna to sit next to her -- or to crowd in with her, she couldn’t tell, and she was too busy leaning back on Luna to notice. 

“Who kicked your ass?” she said, eventually.

“Who kicked our ass,” Luna said. “Do you remember?”

Noctis stared at her for a moment.

And the memories flooded in.

A cave bearing the mark of the Summoner. Leaf-litter and broken bits of rock in a blasted half-circle at the mouth of that cave. Wards, flickering, iridescent blue and gold and green. 

She remembered glaring at the others, willing them to stay put at the mouth of the cave.

She remembered saying, “It’s not done, for two Summoners to enter an Aeon chamber at the same time. As far as the stories go, it’s never happened. It’s not supposed to happen. One Summoner exists in the time when he or she is needed. Not -- two, or three, or more.”

And in the here and now -- “We never even got into the Aeon chamber,” she said, horror starting to claw at her insides.

Luna’s face crumpled into a teary-eyed frown once again. “Right in one. We didn’t make it, and you came in after us and you didn’t make it either.”

“How,” Noctis began, seizing Luna’s hands again. “ _What did Ardyn do?_ Was that place even real, did it even ever have an actual Aeon chamber?”

“It was a real place, yeah,” Luna said, haltingly. “It had a real Aeon chamber. We had gotten to a wall full of carvings, and the script was broken down, but it might still work. It might be the one with Yojimbo in it. He’s -- he’s a strange one, the old books say.”

“So what the fuck was Ardyn doing there?”

She saw the muscle that clenched in Luna’s jaw. “He was -- he was laying a trap. For me.”

“For you -- oh, oh fuck,” Noctis said. “Fuck. He was -- he took Ravus.”

Luna nodded, once, too tightly. “He took my brother. My guardian.”

Power, flashing, painful in Noctis’s mind: Ravus on his knees, a lopsided bleeding shape in the world, the ruin of his cut-off arm smoking next to him. Ravus at swordpoint, and a black blade already pressed into his white coat -- Ravus at the mercy of a laughing Ardyn Izunia.

Laughter that sounded like the high hungry whine of daemons.

“Why?!” And Noctis nearly shouted out the word, and at the door Umbra sprang up, alert.

Luna was weeping, now. “I don’t know if you heard what he said -- ”

“I try not to listen to him, honestly, he doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time, and the rest of it is just stupid shitty bragging -- ”

“He wasn’t bragging this time,” Luna moaned. “He said, I had to do everything I could in order for you to succeed. To become the Master of the Aeons.”

“He wants me to succeed,” Noctis repeated, slowly. “There’s a reason for that. He wants me to become strong, but not because he wants me to defeat him.”

“He wants you to become strong so he can steal all your power.”

“And Ravus -- Ardyn is holding him as a hostage. So you -- so you do what he wants.”

“Yes.”

Luna had never sounded so broken and small and afraid.

Noctis sprang from the bed -- and the pain that knifed up her left side made her trip on the blanket, and land in an ungainly heap on the floor. “Fuck,” she whispered, and raised one fist to punch -- something, anything -- 

Creak, again, of the door opening -- 

Noctis opened her hand without thinking, summoned her own sword -- 

“It’s me,” said a low voice.

She looked up.

Black leggings and dull red armor of leather and mail. Bandages wrapped around an ankle. A sleeveless black shirt. Pale hair, all pulled away from a scarred face.

It was so strange to see this woman without her spear.

But she was also carrying a tray, with cups and a pitcher. “Hit me if you like -- pretty sure I can take it, but maybe wait until after I’ve put this down.” 

“Aranea,” Luna said, from the bed. “You -- you’d better let me drink now.”

“Over my own objections, even,” was the reply, and the woman who commanded the _Highwind_ dropped, gracelessly, into the chair next to the bed, and put her bare feet up next to the pillows, next to where she’d deposited her tray.

“Thanks for the help,” Noctis muttered as she sent her sword away, and pushed up onto her hands and knees.

Umbra was there, again, licking her hands, and so she decided to remain where she was, instead. 

They made a ragged triangle: her on the floor near the foot of the bed, and Aranea in her chair, and Luna still leaning heavily against the wall. 

Noctis’s lap was suddenly full of Umbra’s head and shoulders, and she gave in to the scant comfort of grabbing the wolf by the scruff of his neck. Of resting her chin on the top of his head, right between his ears. 

Aranea sighed, and poured from the pitcher into the cups, and handed them around. “You’ll get no toasts from me right now. But I heard what you were talking about. Drink before you go on.”

“Good idea,” Noctis said, and threw her shot back.

It burned even worse than Ignis’s blue firewater.

“Ugh,” Luna said, and: “I’ll have one more.”

“Wish, command,” Aranea said, and reached out for Noctis’s cup as well. “You?”

“No.”

“More for me then.”

The liquor threw a dull red flush into Luna’s face, called attention to the sallowness of the skin around her eyes.

Aranea drank one more shot -- and smashed her cup right into the wall next to her. “Fuck.”

“That’s what I said,” Noctis said.

“I heard you.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I can’t -- I can’t think,” Luna said, slowly, after a moment. “I -- forgive me, Noctis.”

She made a sharp gesture at her friend. “No. You have nothing to apologize for.” She did want a shot, now, and she didn’t ask for one. “I should be apologizing. You -- this is happening because of me.”

“It is not,” Aranea began.

“No!”

Luna, standing on the bed, suddenly.

And her voice, ringing, loud enough that this time the door did open, revealing an ashen-faced Prompto. 

Gladio and Ignis behind him, looking equal parts murderous and mournful.

“What the fuck, it’s a party,” Aranea said, after a long moment. “Why don’t you all come in. Hope you’ve got extra cups though. Or something else to drink.”

“I am never unprepared,” Ignis said -- but when he dashed out the blue liquor into an ill-matched assortment of cups, he passed her the first one. “I know you need that.”

“Like I need another hole in my head,” Noctis murmured, trying to smile, as she swallowed half of what was in the cup he handed her.

Prompto crowded in on her other side. “I’m -- we haven’t been introduced,” he said, for her ears alone, and tilted his head quickly in the direction of the dire wolf.

“Sorry,” she whispered back. “Prompto, Umbra. Umbra, Prompto. Be nice to him,” she added, shaking a finger at the wolf. “I kind of need him to be around and all in one piece.”

Did Umbra look reproachful, for all of one short moment? But before she could second-guess what she’d seen, he was up, and stretching, and -- she ended up with his rear end in her lap, and his head and shoulders in Prompto’s.

Who looked shocked and shy and skittish, and she really couldn’t blame him at all, when his usually steady hands shook. “H-hi, nice to meet you?”

“He doesn’t bite.” Luna, slumping over again, on the bed. “Not you anyway. He can -- he knows you’re linked to Noctis.”

Noctis watched him point to his throat. “Ring?”

“Among other things.” Fresh tears on Luna’s cheeks, but her voice was steady. “So. Here we all are. But we are not all here.”

“Lunafreya,” Ignis said, as he settled onto the bed. “We would not think less of you for being distraught.”

“I am distraught, and I don’t have time,” was the brittle-sharp reply. “There’s still much that needs to be done.”

“Luna,” Noctis heard herself say.

Prompto, bless him, slid a hand into hers, and said nothing, and the silence of him was strange and unsettling and also something she could almost brace herself on.

“Luna,” she said again. “You know more about Summoners than I do. You know how Summoners’ great tasks end.”

“Always in death,” was the equally haunted reply. “I -- I haven’t gotten to the part where I learned why, or how. My Aeons -- the Sister-Mages -- they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“What’s that like?” Noctis said, trying to smile. “Going around clueless and idiotically happy?”

“Noct,” Gladio growled from next to the door.

She barked out a harsh laugh.

Prompto’s hand clenched around hers.

“What is it that you’re trying to tell us,” Aranea said.

“I -- shit, this is not easy, okay,” Noctis said, and in the end she closed her eyes and said it all in a rush:

“Luna. He said he wanted me to be the Master of the Aeons, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not what a Summoner ends up becoming. A Summoner, with only his or her Aeons, is not a person with a great task. The great task is -- it’s worse. It’s big, and it’s bad, and it’s --

“The great task is not to find the Aeons. The great task is to find the Astrals, and to become their Master.”

“Impossible,” she heard Luna say.

“I know it’s impossible.” Noctis looked up. Met her friend’s eyes.

And Luna suddenly looked away.

The words continued to pour out of Noctis, where all the others could hear, now.

“I’d summon Ixion to tell you all this, but we’d destroy this cabin, so. Don’t ask me what made him talk. I almost wish he hadn’t, but here he is inside me, and all the things he told me, well, I’m carrying that, too.”

“Which one of the Six is he?” Luna whispered.

“Ramuh,” Noctis said.

She could still remember the star-white heat of the Astral’s touch, the fire of it rushing in her veins, leaving her screaming in pain, unable to move, unable to even think or breathe -- 

And the bolt of its knowledge, striking home, multiplying her pain a thousand thousand times over -- 

“Noct,” said a quiet voice next to her, and when she opened her eyes again all she saw, first, was the pattern on Prompto’s shirt: the white lines and angles in softly glowing thread, stitched precisely and meticulously into black cloth.

His arms around her shoulders, his hand at the back of her neck.

“Breathe,” he said.

“Here,” added another voice: Aranea?

Negligible weight pressed into her hand, and the sound of soft sloshing.

“This is getting to be a bad habit,” she heard Ignis mutter.

“You got any other ideas, now would be a good time,” was Gladio’s curt reply.

Noctis sat up. Stared at the shot that she was now holding.

And she said, “Fuck,” and toasted the room at large, before gulping the alcohol down.

The room whirled around her as she kissed Prompto’s cheek, and forced herself to her feet -- as she wove towards Luna, and kissed the top of her head as well. 

“I can’t -- I can’t ask you to do this,” Luna said, suddenly.

Noctis only looked down into her eyes. “Great task,” she said, quietly, slowly. “This world will die, if I don’t complete my great task.”

“So you die, for all of us? So you play into Ardyn’s hands, for all our sakes? No, Noctis, I will not allow it!”

She stepped back as Luna suddenly stood, suddenly manifested a bright flame in her hand -- a flame that turned into a trident. Three sharp spear-heads, and the phases of the moon carved into the cross-guard. “I am the Oracle,” she said. “I am the _last_ Oracle. I can take the great task from you, Noctis. I can take it for my own. I can bear the Aeons, the Astrals, and -- ”

Where the smile came from, Noctis didn’t know.

But she gently pushed her friend’s weapon aside, and placed her hands on her shoulders. “It has to be me, Luna,” she said. “I’m the one with the plan. I have a plan. And -- it’s a good one, I think. It’ll work. I can make it work. I can force it to work.”

“How -- ”

The ghostly image of a man sleeping in Crystal, far in the back of Noctis’s mind.

The whisper of his prayer, the prayer that she said whenever she strode into the fight.

She didn’t say that prayer out loud.

“Trust me?” she asked, instead.

“Noctis,” Luna said. “I -- why -- ”

“I will,” she said, simply. “I can. I choose to.”

And suddenly Luna squared her shoulders and looked her full in her eyes, and she must have seen something, because the trident in her hand vanished into light -- into three bright flames. “My Aeons,” Luna said. “The Sister-Mages. Will you carry them with me?”

“Yeah,” Noctis said.

She felt the brush of Luna’s power against hers, and the three flames became six.

Noctis smiled, and said, “Thank you,” and gathered the three new flames to her heart. 

_The Oracle spoke to us of your task,_ whispered one of the Sister-Mages, inside her head. _We would join you. We would lend our strength to you._

Noctis sat down, hard, after.

“That -- that too should have been impossible,” Aranea said, suddenly.

“These are impossible times,” was Luna’s quiet answer.

“There is one thing that’s _not_ impossible,” Noctis said. “I know it’s not. We can make it possible.”

“Oh, shit, here we go,” she heard Prompto say.

“Pretty much,” she said, and she leveled a smile on him, and on Umbra lying at his side.

She shared that hard smile with everyone else in the room: Ignis, Gladio, Aranea.

Finally, she clasped both of Luna’s hands in hers. “Rest,” she said. “Rest. We can take a day or two. Lots of things waiting for us. Yojimbo, first -- and then, and then -- Niflheim. All right? Ravus needs you, and you need Ravus, and you’re getting him back, because I’ll be with you every step of the way. I will help you get him back.”

“Ardyn,” she heard Luna say.

Noctis shook her head. “No matter what he does to us: are you ever going to stop fighting him?”

“No.”

“I’m not planning to, either. That’s a promise.”


	9. the sending

No one had ever told her how cold the desert got, once the sun had gone down.

It didn’t make any sense to her, not really: for the sun beat down on the sand and on the rocks of Leide during the daytime, and everything faded into blinding light and heat haze and the searing choking pain of thirst, snapping at her heels with every moment, and that was how a desert worked, right? It was a desert because it was barren, because it was desolate, and just being in it -- just driving through it was already a dangerous thing, was already several kinds of burning agony.

But then they’d started going on the hunts and -- sure it was great to have spending money, sure it was cool to stumble upon treasure in the sands, but -- fighting under the sun was draining. It left her itching with more than the sand that dug sharp into her skin -- it left her at the mercy of seeing mirages, of attacking things that weren’t there, and that would only leave her open to actual attacks from all the strange creatures that called the desert home.

At night, though, the sun fell below the horizon and the stars spread their faint scattered light into the dark sky, and -- all the heat and all the haze went away with the sun. 

The jacket she couldn’t bear to put on during the daytime hours was an absolute necessity if she wanted to survive the nights. 

She huddled in it now, in the last watch of the night, and once the sun came up they’d all pile into the Regalia once more and drive back to the Hammerhead, and this time, this time they’d be bringing back something important.

She thought she still stank of mine-waste even now, after the hasty scrub that Ignis had permitted her, when they’d set up camp for the night.

She told herself firmly that she was not indoors, that she was not trapped in a cave, that she was not in Balouve: she was in the cold night outside the mines, she was sitting in a camp chair under a clear sky, she was casting shadows both by the flickering campfire and the waning moon, arc-shaped and traveling in its arc overhead.

But she could still hear the skittering and the hissing. The rapidfire footsteps of goblins swarming to the attack.

As she had done several times during her watch, she reached for the power that lived deep within her, and drew out the Bow of the Clever: white in her hands as she turned it over and over. It looked like it had been written on, like it was wrapped in the words of the ancient king who had wielded it, long ago.

She didn’t know who he was, didn’t know his name. Only knew that he had been her ancestor.

They’d covered crossbows during her weapons lessons in Insomnia -- and she could remember every single time that Clarus Amicitia had come to observe those lessons. The way he stood quietly in a corner and never said a word, but every time he cleared his throat and asked for permission to demonstrate something he’d never, ever missed. The hints he’d let drop so that she could learn to brace herself against the inevitable recoil of the bow, the way it kicked in her hands. The way he cranked back the string, every time the same steps, never varying.

That she had never had to suffer the indignity of shooting herself with any one of the practice crossbows -- well, that was something, she supposed, but it wasn’t because she was actually any good at using the damned things.

Still, here one was, and it called to her, as though her ancestor were reaching out to her in the night, through the uncountable years that separated him from her.

She didn’t think about loading the crossbow: but she did rise from her camp chair, and turn towards the yawning pit in the earth that marked the main entrance into the Balouve Mines.

Whispers in her ear, Cor and Clarus, and the rules of handling a crossbow: and she wasn’t aware that she was muttering in the night, but she ran her eyes over the weapon in her hands all the same, following their instructions. Checking that all of its parts were in working order -- without getting her hands into the string or the track for the quarrel.

Muscle discipline, so she didn’t commit the cardinal mistake of aiming the crossbow at herself: her face, her feet, or any other part of her body; and trigger discipline, because she had no intentions of firing, but that still meant that she wasn’t allowed to touch the trigger unless she was actually going to shoot. 

Oh, how she remembered the quiet hissed lecture she’d gotten from Cor, on the one and only occasion she’d dry-fired a crossbow while he was there to see it:

“Don’t, Princess. Just don’t, unless you enjoy destroying these weapons -- and if that’s what you’re determined to do, then we’re done here. You’ll be no student of mine.”

Looking toward the shadows of the mine, she was reminded of the way Prompto handled his guns.

Not much of a difference between a crossbow and a gun, she thought, after a moment.

She thought of Clarus as she set the crossbow on Gladio’s vacant chair, her hands moving well above it as she went through the actions of loading and unloading an imaginary quarrel. The crossbows she’d trained with had all used hand cranks, and what a strain they’d been on her shoulders when she’d first started.

There was no such crank on the Bow of the Clever.

It would probably all have to be in her mind, if she found herself in a situation where she’d have to use it.

Just as she was vanishing the crossbow, she heard a grunt, and a rustling from inside the tent.

“Noct. Wake up,” Gladio was saying, as he emerged.

She gave him a blank look. “Why are you telling me to wake up? I _am_ awake.”

“I spend too much time saying it,” was the reply, as he poured himself a glass of water. And: “Stay there.”

“Where the fuck would I go?”

He came back with beads of water clinging to his hands, and a book peeking from the pocket of his trousers. “Two hours,” he said, meaning she had time to take a nap.

“I’ll stay up,” she said. “We’re not hunting today, anyway.”

“Says who.”

“Says me. We just cleared out a mine full of -- things that I don’t want to think about,” she muttered. “You want to wear yourself out, fine by me, but I swear I’ll laugh at you if you get yourself injured.”

“Since when did you start making sense,” he asked.

Noctis stalked over to him and shook her middle finger under his nose.

“Get out of my face, Noctis.”

Several battles of _King’s Knight_ later, the sky overhead began to break into faint gray and blue.

That was her signal, she thought, and she rose to her feet, and drew her staff.

Gladio was instantly standing next to her, peering suspiciously. “What do you think you’re doing with that?”

She strode away from the camp without answering him -- only to stop when his hand landed on her shoulder. “I said, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Nowhere else to go but back -- back to Galdin Quay, from here,” she said. “We’ve -- cleared Leide. As far as we know. Right?”

“Start making sense.”

“I know you know I’m making sense,” she said. “You know I’m a Summoner. I’m going to be able to call on Aeons if I need them in a fight. And I’m also going to be able to let them go, when the fight is over. I Summon, and that means -- I banish.”

“No Aeons here,” he said.

“None,” she agreed. “Just a whole lot of corrupted spirits. But that doesn’t mean our duty to them starts and ends with killing them.”

“You have a duty to -- goblins,” he said, and she saw disbelief in his eyes.

“I have a duty to the men and women who were turned into goblins,” she said, holding his gaze. “They were people. So I have to care for their spirits.”

Something was appearing in his face, something almost like the shape of understanding -- something almost like the shape of respect.

“Give me some space, please,” Noctis said.

“Still have to protect you,” he said.

“Do you want to be caught in this? Then I’d have to explain to your dad and to mine why I suddenly had to send you home _dead_ , and -- well, you’d be dead, so you’d never know, but I’m pretty sure they’ll come all the way out here just to kick my ass,” she said.

It was almost funny, how quickly he moved back.

And the fantastic scowl he wore was even funnier.

There he was on the very perimeter of the camp and its wards.

She was going to have to focus a little more closely, this time.

Now the voice in her head was Crowe’s, talking about sending wayward spirits to rest.

It was magic and it was also prayer, and -- she had the ability to weave those two different kinds of power together.

But she’d only ever done this in a purely theoretical sense.

And she couldn’t disappoint the spirits of the miners.

Slow and steady, Noctis thought, falling into the quiet stillness of controlling her breath. 

The sky lightened and lightened above her, the stars vanishing one by one.

Soon the cold of the night would be smothered and crushed by the sun.

It was here and now, or she’d never be able to do this.

She held her staff out to the side, perfectly parallel above the ground.

“Hear me,” she said. “Hear me and heed my cry, you who fell here. Heed my cry, and the cry of your homeland.”

She stepped into a wide circle, staff still level even as she turned and turned -- three times, before she raised her arm -- and still she moved in circles.

The wing on her staff traced spiraling paths pointing into the brightening sky.

The sand that rose in the wake of her steps multiplied and amplified those rising spirals.

Strangled half-shout, behind her.

She cast her eyes down, just for a moment.

The ground had fallen away from her.

Still she moved, several feet above the ground: now she was bowing, to salute the spirits, and now she was holding her staff in both hands, raising it to the sky to show the spirits the way.

And again, turning, turning -- 

When she had practiced this, she’d been surrounded by whispering voices that rose and rose as she tried to move smoothly through the steps.

No voices here.

But she thought she could hear a faintly rising note in the warming wind, a sweetly struck note.

The earth, below her, sighed, long low relief.

When she stopped, when she landed, her boots touched down in the midst of blue flame.

“By our hands,” she whispered, and now this was the prayer, and she said it in her mind as she opened herself to the energy she’d gathered.

The energy of Leide, and of its endless blue skies.

The nooks and crannies in the bleached rock, where life clung, determined.

Water running deep beneath her, cooled by the earth, where the sun could not snatch it greedily away. 

Seeds fluttering on the wind, and roots slowly crumbling stone into earth.

Living things that died, and rotted, and returned to the soil that had raised them in the first place.

These things had to go on, freed of corruption, freed of the daemons.

Blue flame running in her veins, running in her blood, and she stood straight with her face turned up to the sky. Hands at shoulder height, empty, the better for the energy to rush cleanly through her, strange and powerful, and -- rising, rising, the blue flame into the bluing sky -- 

She was the bridge between this world and the one where the Astrals lived, energy infusing her and offered up to the Six.

How long did that offering take? A day and a night. The time between one heartbeat and the next.

Noctis opened her eyes to the sunrise, and even though she knew what was coming -- another merciless desert day -- she smiled.

She’d tried to do it properly, and she might have done it right.

Faintly lingering blue flame on the hem of her dress as she exhaled, and finished her ritual.

And she gestured with the hand that had held the staff last: she brought it in towards her heart, until her fingertips brushed the crystals on her dress.

There. It was done, here.

Footsteps, coming closer. 

And she turned to see Gladio standing there, shaking his head.

“You think I didn’t do it right?” she asked as she took the cup of water he was holding out to her.

“How the fuck would I know? I read about Summoners. I never met one. I never walked with one.”

“Until me,” she said, sipping her water.

“Until you.” And: “What’s with all the waving anyway? All the drama?”

She almost laughed. “You read romance novels. Lots of drama in those.”

“Drama in books makes me feel emotions. Drama in prayers? Don’t see the point.”

“Maybe you don’t,” she said. “You say the words and you believe them or not, and that’s it: the power is in the words. Not true for other people. Some of them might need to see what I’m actually doing.”

“Which is?”

She sank into her camp chair and drained the cup again. “Not the magic, obviously: but the movements, the gestures, all of that, they mean things. I call the spirits, I offer them solace, and send them into peace, if I can, if they can. Peace, or judgment, or whatever. I don’t give them peace, I don’t judge them, I don’t do anything except that: I open the door for them to go through, that’s all. Whatever happens on the other side, I have no idea. The movements tell that story for other people, so they know what’s going on.”

“Huh.”

“Don’t be too impressed,” Noctis muttered, and she took off her jacket and sank lower into the chair.

Sleep was tugging at her, now, but he looked like he wanted to say something. “What?”

“Can you do a sending for someone who’s long dead?”

She sat up, suddenly.

Blinked at him.

“Your mother?” she asked.

“Doesn’t have to be now.” He was looking at his hands, at the book in his hands. “And yeah. My mother.”

She stared at him for a moment.

“Forget I asked,” Gladio said, eventually.

“No,” she said, and carefully laid her hand on his arm. “I’ll do it.”

“I’ll tell Iris,” he said. “So she can thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, as gently as she could.


	10. story of his storm

“Don’t you all look so -- content, now,” and Noctis was going to strike first and ask questions later -- she leaped to her feet, and didn’t even think of using her warping abilities. All she knew was the fluttering maddened panic of her heart, and the color draining rapidly from Prompto’s face, the flash of knives appearing in Ignis’s hands, and Gladio getting very deliberately to his feet -- 

She was faster, still, somehow, than any of her companions: and here was the blazing white flame in her left hand and her own real knife in the other, both ready to fly, toward that neck in its swathes of ridiculous lace, that heart that had to beat under the gaudy embellished leather -- 

“Oh, touchy, touchy -- perhaps we’ll continue this conversation another time, shall we?” 

Later, Noctis would regret that she’d stopped to snarl at him: “I don’t even want to _start_. I have nothing to say to you. We have nothing to say to you. Get the fuck out, or else.”

“I’d do as she suggests,” and that was Ignis’s voice, steady, backing hers up. “And were I you, I’d consider myself fortunate. The only thing that’s stopping me, stopping my Princess, from attacking, is the fact that this place is a haven _for all_. We will not stain its stones with your blood.”

“Very kind of you, to warn me of my death! Very noble! We’ll see which one of us is still standing, when the night falls at last, in its long years!”

And Ardyn Izunia was backing away --

She couldn’t feel any kind of satisfaction, not when she desperately wanted to erase that insufferable grin of his -- 

“Guys.”

A small voice, almost shattered by the lapping of the waves against the posts that supported the quay.

A small voice, muffled even more by the bulk of Gladio: who was crouching in front of Prompto, shielding him.

Noctis watched as Gladio looked over his shoulder. “No, you’re not all right. You’re gonna need help walking. Where to?”

Prompto’s mouth, opening and closing. Working in silence.

The whites of his eyes showing all around.

“Fuck,” Noctis said, and vanished the flame she was still holding on to. Thrust her knife back into its scabbard, and this time she did flash to Prompto’s side, and normally she’d ask permission to do this, but he was already listing to the side and she wedged herself under his shoulder -- the skin of his arm was clammy, cold sweat in huge beads and his freckles too easy to see with how pale he’d gone -- 

“I’ll see to things here,” Ignis was saying, as she looked to him and nodded, once.

And then all her attention switched back to the boy in her arms, the boy who was trying to say her name: “Noct.”

“Can you put your arms around me?” she asked.

“I -- I can’t,” and his voice rose into a thin wail.

She hunched over him, and whispered, soothing, “Come on. Come walk with me.”

With the sun breaking on the waves, with the light that it was splashing into her eyes, she had no idea where she was going: all she knew was that she had to get him to a safe place, to a quiet place, where she could try to look after him.

Prompto was whispering, next to her, and she couldn’t make heads or tails of the numbers that he was repeating, over and over.

Down the beach and -- oh, there, there was the Regalia.

She guided him around to the shotgun seat, and poured him in, and said, “Seat belt, okay? Just -- keep it loose if you like. But you have to put it on or this thing won’t start.”

“Yeah.” Too faint a reply.

Too wrong.

She threw herself into the driver’s seat and fought to concentrate on the steering wheel beneath her hands, the smooth thrum of the engine as it turned over and started, the noise of it rising to a roar, as she peeled out of the Galdin Quay parking lot.

(Later, Ignis would tell her how she’d left long lines of burned rubber in her wake.)

Here was the road that ran along the coast, and here were the little lanes that ran towards -- private homes, she supposed, and more exclusive resorts.

Past those, and then there, there, she knew that sign and she knew the road that the sign was pointing to.

She’d been here before, under the golden glow of a full moon, with her father carefully guiding the Regalia down a twisting path -- she watched the road and sighed in relief to pull up at a modest cabin.

“Noct?” Prompto asked, when she killed the engine.

She said, “Family property.”

“I didn’t know you owned something like this.”

“I don’t. On paper this property belongs to my mother. To her distant relatives.”

The same care pulling him out of the car as when she’d helped him in.

And she turned her back on the cabin. 

The footpath that she could still remember was nearly lost beneath layers upon layers of green shadows and broad leaves, but here were the shell-shaped stones that pointed out the way, exactly one hundred steps down to a small cove and the soft hiss of the waves breaking in bright foam on the sand.

Quick message to the others, just to let them know where she and Prompto were.

And she led him to a pile of rocks, water-smoothed, providing a little shade from the warmth of the sun.

He sat, boneless and graceless, on the sand -- and she perched in his lap to face him, sitting on his knees to rub her hands over his arms. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe for me, that’s all, just -- in, hold, out. Everything else can wait. Just -- breathe, please?”

He was blinking, and breathing, and she forced herself to smile, to encourage him.

But he was able to see right through her. 

His words, quiet and true: “I can feel the way you’re shaking, you know.”

“Sorry,” she said, immediately. “I need to be looking after you. Not -- distracted.”

“You want to kill him, don’t you.”

“Name the time and place,” she said, truthfully.

He deserved her honesty, always.

“From the look on his face you might have to get in line behind Iggy.”

“I don’t know what his problem with Ardyn is, but as long as he leaves behind something I can kill, I have no objections to letting him go first.”

“And if I wanted to jump the line?”

She blinked. “You’re joking, right,” she said, slowly. “If Ignis heard you say that -- he’d back you up all the way. _I_ would back you up, no questions asked. You know that. You do, Prompto, right?”

“Not -- not sure,” he said, and he was covering his face with his hands, he was falling forward -- 

She caught him, and pulled him close, even as she felt his tears soak into her dress. 

“Hush, hush,” she said, trying to soothe him. 

Even the back of his neck was clammy, when she stroked his hair.

And through the sobs she heard him say, voice strangled around the words, “I am not -- I am not -- not the numbers. I am not the numbers, I am not a thing -- ”

“You are not a thing,” she said, quietly. “I know you’re not a thing. We know you’re not a thing.”

“I want to believe that,” she heard him say. “But -- my mind plays tricks on me, sometimes. No, not sometimes. A lot.”

“If you want to tell me,” she said.

“I do. I do. But I’m so scared.”

She tried to smile though he couldn’t see it. “You are the bravest person I know.”

“Am I? Then why can’t I talk? I -- fuck. Fuck,” he said. 

And, after a long silence: “My wrist. My -- thing. Bracelet.”

She looked at the braided leather, green and brown cords, and the metal buckle against his skin. 

Come to think of it: when had she ever seen him _without_ any kind of cuff on that hand?

At school he’d worn his button-down shirts a couple of sizes larger than would fit him, the cuffs always buttoned tightly.

When he joined the Crownsguard he’d gained the confidence to wear sleeveless shirts, but still he covered his wrist at all times.

She touched that bracelet now. “I see it, Prompto,” she said. “Why are you talking about it?”

“Before I lose my nerve,” he said, and she froze.

“Before I lose my nerve, Noct: takeitoff,” he said.

She hesitated.

Long enough for him to look at her, and long enough for him to form the word “Please” with his mouth, though no sound came out of him.

Her fingers shook on his trembling wrist as she clicked the buckle open.

The area of his wrist that was always covered was paler than the rest of his arm, pale enough to make the freckles there especially noticeable.

But her eyes were caught and pinned on the ink in his skin, the ink in the form of dark bars and numbers -- 

The numbers that he had been saying.

“What,” she said, very very softly.

“Don’t hate me,” Prompto said, just as hushed.

“I swear I don’t!” she said, as vehemently as she could.

Again the fear rolling off him in waves.

She tried to speak again, more quietly. More gently. For his sake. “I -- don’t hate you, I swear, but I don’t understand this. I see bar codes on things, on objects, and -- you are not a thing, Prom, you are not an object, you are the farthest thing from an object -- who the fuck did this to you?”

“I can’t tell you their names because they told us they didn’t have any, that they were just like us,” he said, and that made no sense either. “Only Ardyn had a name. And he would come and visit and laugh at us, and propose to test us. Break us open, he said, fill us with -- bad things. Liquefied daemons. Do you even know what you need to do to a daemon just to turn it into liquid? I -- I watched. I was made to watch, when they liquefied a daemon and then -- they poured it into me, they forced me to drink it -- I was so sick, I thought I was going to die -- I _wanted_ to die, Noct, I wanted them to stop doing things to me and they wouldn’t stop, they didn’t stop, they kept reviving me -- ”

The rising wail of his voice. The fear slashed into his words.

And the story -- the terrible story -- 

She swallowed, hard, and wrapped her hands around his upper arms. “Prom? Prompto. Hey. Hey. Look at me, please look at me.”

He blinked.

The torrent of his words stopped in mid-flow.

The litany of his horrors stopped in mid-flow.

She was shivering despite the sun at its highest point, despite the gentle breeze, despite the cool water just a few feet away.

“I -- help me understand,” she said. “You said: daemons. You said: Ardyn. And this,” and she circled the air above the mark on his wrist. “I want to understand. And I swear I won’t hate you. But -- is there a beginning to this story? Can you take me to the beginning of the story?”

His eyes full of tears, his trembling mouth.

She couldn’t touch the mark in his skin, not without his explicit permission.

But she could stroke her thumbs over his tears, over his lips. “I want to hear your story. I want to understand.”

“Why,” he said.

“You should be afraid of me,” he said.

“Maybe I should: but not until you tell me. And even then, after you tell me, I might not be afraid. I can’t do anything until I know, and -- in order for me to know, you have to tell me. If you can, Prompto, only if you can. I -- wanted you to know, that I wanted to understand.” She sighed, and shook her head. “I’m not making sense, am I.”

He was silent for a long time.

His head bowed, and the numbers on his skin, still falling from his lips from time to time.

She was seriously entertaining the idea of calling the other two in, when: 

“Niflheim,” Prompto said.

She looked up at him.

“Beginning of the story, you said,” he was saying, hoarsely. “Niflheim is the beginning of the story. I was -- born there? I think? I know I was a child there. Not sure if I really was from there, and I’m not sure because I was a child in an MT facility.”

“MT,” she repeated.

She knew what that meant.

He must have seen it in her eyes, because he laughed, broken and brittle and low. “Yeah. And what do you think the Nifs do to the children they locked up in their MT facilities? Raise them to be MTs. Give them lessons in being child soldiers, so they can become MT soldiers when they grow up.”

“Firearms training,” she said, and touched the ring-and-ribbon he wore around his throat.

“Yeah. I know guns and machine weapons. That’s why.”

“As a child?”

“Yeah,” he said, again. “I can’t remember when the -- the treatments started. When the pain started. I just remember there was a lot of pain. Until -- until there wasn’t any more.”

“You got out.”

He nodded, once, stiffly. “I wanted to get out. I didn’t actually do anything about it. I couldn’t. I had to be dragged out, and I was afraid for so long, even after I had been dragged out.”

“Who got you out?”

“Who else,” he said. “Marshal. Your Marshal. Cor Leonis. He brought me to Insomnia. He -- he brought me to you, for some reason.”

A conversation next to a windowsill, and the suspicion that Cor had been keeping tabs on Prompto. Cor’s matter-of-fact statement: _You only need to know that I have been._

“Maybe he was watching me because he was waiting to see if I’d -- break. If I’d try to attack you or your dad. Better to know quickly, right? Better for me to be under his watch?”

She wanted to deny it. Wanted to shake her head. It didn’t sound like Cor at all -- or at least he hadn’t sounded suspicious, or wary, in that one conversation.

Cor had sounded -- worried. 

Worried for Prompto, and she said so, now, to Prompto himself: “He was -- rooting for you and me,” she said, quietly. “That day with the quilt.”

If he stared at her again, at least he looked more like himself, like he wanted to give her a smart answer of some kind: “Rooting for me? For us? Why even.”

Words rose in Noctis’s throat, a torrent of words, a torrent of her emotions.

She opened her mouth, and closed it.

If she told him, he’d listen to her, but his fear and his pain would also try to wriggle through the cracks in her words, the cracks in her explanation, and if that happened -- she’d lose him.

So it wouldn’t be her words that would convince him.

She would have to act, in order to _show_ him.

She climbed out of his lap, finally, and slipped on the sand as she tried to stand.

And Prompto, somehow so much quicker than she was, so much steadier than she was, got up, and pulled her up with him.

He hadn’t even once paused to think: he had just done it for her, steadying her. 

And yes, there were stories about sleeper agents. Stories about enemy spies.

But -- Prompto was neither of those.

She almost cursed her mind for listing every opportunity he’d missed to kill her.

Two missed opportunities in the last two years alone.

And the biggest one he’d missed was the night she drove the Regalia out of Insomnia with them in tow, having just laid claim to her great task.

If he had really been a Nif weapon biding his time, then that would had been the right and only moment to strike, right after she had declared herself a Summoner: confirmation of her great task, and immediate elimination of the threat that she was.

Instead he had knelt to her, and pledged himself to be her companion and her guardian.

Was that how it worked?

Was she right?

Only one way to find out.

She raised herself onto the tips of her toes and kissed his cheek.

Stepped away, and pressed her hand over her heart -- and she drew out her power to its fullest.

There, there, Prompto was bracing himself against the rock, away from the thirteen lights that danced around her, ghostlike in the sun. The places that waited for the Royal Arms of Lucis, waiting around the core of her power. The names danced in her mind, but they were not really there and she couldn’t really call them out when she didn’t even have them in the first place -- but here, here she was with all her power on display, and what was Prompto doing?

He was not attacking.

He was not terrified and still.

He was reaching out to the blue-glittering fire with an expression of pure wonder on his face. 

He was saying her name: “Noctis?”

“Yeah,” she said, and she could no longer hold back her smile. “This is the power I’ve got, at least until I can start gathering the Aeons. Then I can add their power to mine -- I think that’s how it works. I could be wrong.”

“Okay, but why are you showing it to me?”

“Because I wanted you to figure it out for yourself,” she said. “When was the last time you saw me do something like this?”

Confusion, in the lines of his sudden frown. “When you left Insomnia. When we left with you.”

“And?”

“And I went with you, I said I’d be with you.”

“You should have killed me then,” she said. “If you were really a weapon. Did you want to? Kill me?”

This time she clearly saw the shock that struck him, that widened his eyes. “I wanted to _follow_ you! I wanted to keep you safe!”

“Would an MT feel that way towards me? I’m the last of the Lucii. I’m the last Caelum. I’m a sworn enemy of Niflheim, and therefore a sworn enemy of MTs. Yes?”

“Yes,” Prompto said, slowly.

“If you didn’t feel that you wanted to kill me, if you didn’t feel that you wanted to eliminate me -- then maybe it makes sense that you’re not an MT. Maybe you’re something else, who knows, I know I don’t. 

“But I do know you’re not loyal to Niflheim. I do know you’re not an MT. I am not dead. You haven’t killed me. You spend a lot of time trying to make sure I don’t get killed. You’re not an MT, Prompto.”

She wanted him to believe in her.

And he was reaching out for her, he was trying to reach for her hand.

Not for her power, the lights that stood in for the potential she carried within her.

He was trying to reach for her hand.

“It can’t be that easy,” he said, and her heart sank --

Until she saw him grit his teeth and step forward, and take both of her hands in his own.

“It can’t be that easy,” he repeated. “I -- what if I can’t always believe in you?”

She felt her smile falter, but she told him the truth anyway. “Then I won’t lie to you. That might hurt. But I won’t stop trying to convince you.” She shook his hands where she was clutching them tightly, mirroring his white-knuckled grip. “I won’t stop fighting for us. Unless you want me to stop.”

“No,” he said, sharp harsh exhale. And: “Six. Noctis. What the hell is going on? What are our lives?”

“Good question,” she said, and released her power, let it all rush back into her -- except for her sword, floating next to their joined hands. “One I intend to ask the Astrals as soon as I get a chance.”

“And Ardyn?”

She made a face. “Ugh, no, I don’t want to ask him any questions, he doesn’t have any answers worth listening to. He’s a big bag of dicks.” 

Her reward was a startled cough of a laugh. “That’s a terrible thought, Noct,” she heard Prompto say.

“Isn’t it?” 

Daring, gently daring, she pulled him close.

Flicker of recognition in his eyes, that she saw for only a moment, because he was closing the distance on his own, because he was kissing her.

Only a moment, and she sighed when he pulled away, but he didn’t go far, and he didn’t let her hands go. “I shouldn’t be making things difficult for you, when you’ve got this great task to do.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t make it all by myself. I couldn’t even have gotten this far without any of you -- and yes, before you ask, that really does include you. So if we have to deal with this from time to time -- we will. I’ll help you. Can we -- do that?”

“O-okay,” he said. And, more firmly. “I want to -- go on with you.”

“Good,” Noctis said, “because I have no intentions of going on without you.”

Later, she thought, later she’d draw the entire story out of him, all in the right order. All the terrible details. How he had learned his own story.

Not now, though.

Right now, she just wanted to hold on to him.


	11. you call this a rescue mission?

“Drop zone in an hour,” said the voice over the speakers, distorted with more than just the scream of the storm-scented winds, with more than just the stink of burned blood, more than just the reek of metal rendered into sharp ash.

Noctis heard the words, and didn’t move from where she was still trying to huddle in on herself, wedged in a corner of the cramped personnel bay.

The groan of the airship as it fought through the winds that tried to toss it off-course rattled through her very teeth, down her aching bones, and she cursed the snow and she cursed the wind and she cursed the very fact that she was sitting in the cramped personnel bay of the _Highwind_ , which was making its way towards a facility hidden in the snowbound mountains far north of Gralea, the capital of the Niflheim Empire.

Flash and flash again of her power and she gritted her teeth against the pain that gnawed at her, the remembered pain and the remembered tears -- she’d only been a child, and it should have been a blessing and a gift to forget that she had witnessed the scenes that flashed past her mind’s eye.

But her power kept dragging the pain back up to the surface, spreading it across her thoughts like blood turning dark on ash-flecked snow.

Herself in her father’s arms, weeping and covering her ears, but not even her own hands were enough to block the clash and the cry of the Kingsglaive and their weapons and the pitched battle that they were fighting against the masks and the armor of the Niflheim soldiers.

Nyx Ulric and Crowe Altius, back-to-back and whirling together like a storm of power, and almost they were enough to turn back the tide.

Almost they were enough of a shield.

But the blue flame of the Royal Arms of Lucis flared up around her father’s arm and she trembled, soundlessly, and hid her face in his jacket.

The movements of his arms as he hefted one weapon after another, slashing and slicing through the unfortunates in his path.

And the Kingsglaive, limping in his wake, the whole group just barely managing to get out alive.

The scar on Crowe’s face had lingered for many years, stubbornly refusing to fade, an angry red line down her cheek and throat.

Crowe. Nyx. Clarus. Regis. All gone, now, all their lives spent in the ultimate -- and ultimately futile -- defense of Insomnia. 

Was it a premonition, Noctis wondered as she clenched her teeth against the tears that were gathering in her eyes once again. Was it a memory and nothing else, or was it also a premonition and a sign of things to come?

Especially since the shape of the person settling next to her reminded her too much of Crowe.

Coat-tails flaring out in the constant lash and hiss of the wind, and the strange shapes and curves cut into those coat-tails, like Valefor’s great wings, like the flying surfaces of some sinuous predator. 

Black veil over bright hair, and the braids shorn away, the long brave streaming waves chopped cruelly short. 

The Luna who sat down near her, who wrapped her arms around her, was a Luna shrouded in black.

Nearly unrecognizable, down to the remnants of the ash burned into her cheeks, into her arms, from the Aeon chamber in which Noctis had had to subdue -- there was no other word for it -- the recalcitrant Yojimbo.

She turned her face into Luna’s shoulder, and sobbed, quietly. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news,” she whispered.

“I think now would be a good time for us to talk about bad news,” was the equally torn reply. “I mean, other than the bad news that Aranea has been bringing us all this time.”

Noctis blinked, distracted. “Why even is she your guardian?”

“She volunteered,” Luna said quietly. “She literally just turned up on my doorstep one day, and she knew that I was going to see the Aeons, and she said she could help us travel.”

“I don’t know how you can stand to travel in this thing,” Noctis moaned as her stomach heaved once again. 

“I got used to it, but yes, it takes time.”

“Time I don’t have.” Noctis drew a deep and shaky breath. “Luna. Are you prepared?”

“Noctis,” was the answer, almost drowned out in the roar of the airship.

“I need to know, Luna,” she said. “Because I can’t blame you if you tell me you can’t fight -- him. I wouldn’t dare to blame you. But -- I have to know, so I can get ready. So I can find a way to out-think him.”

Luna shivered in her arms, like a leaf in a fierce storm.

On and on the _Highwind_ droned around her, around them, and with every passing moment the stink of blood and of burned metal settled deeper and deeper into her skin, like stains that she almost expected to see, when she looked at her bared arms.

“Drop zone, thirty minutes,” Aranea said. “And I have news from your companions, Princess.”

“Are they all right,” Noctis asked.

The immense weight of Gladio’s hand on her shoulder -- Ignis’s solemn gaze -- Prompto’s whisper. “This isn’t goodbye.” 

The silhouettes of her guardians, walking away from her in the cold long shadows of dusk, tracing out a long flanking path.

Her guardians, walking away from her, to be the bait in the trap.

“ -- seeing more and more drop ships in their area, it won’t be long now before they’ll have to retreat,” Aranea was saying.

Noctis drew in a tight cold breath, and tried to swallow her fear. “Thank you,” she said, and winced when the words came out as though they were being dragged over rocks. 

“Get us in as close as you possibly can,” Luna suddenly said.

“Close enough to see the whites of their eyes,” was Aranea’s reply, “if they still had whites in their eyes, that is. Good enough for you?”

“Yes.”

Noctis blinked, and nearly warped backwards just to get out of the way, as the girl in her arms suddenly got to her feet.

“Luna,” she said, carefully, rising and fighting for her balance as the airship continued to list from side to side.

“Better get ready,” Aranea said.

And Noctis settled her jacket and her gloves, and retied the laces on her boots, and then she had to almost run to the very doors of the personnel bay: run to Luna, who was standing over the blank bleak landscape of snow and rocks flashing past, far below. 

“You never answered my question,” Noctis shouted, and the wind tore her words away from her anyway.

“Am I prepared to fight him?” Luna growled back. “Depends. Which _him_ are you talking about?”

Noctis blinked.

Cut her eyes in her friend’s direction.

Impossibly, Luna’s words seemed to grow harder and harder. “My brother. Or, whatever is left of that body, if it’s been taken over completely by Ardyn. Or -- Ardyn himself. Those are the possibilities, yes?”

“Yeah,” Noctis said, as she summoned her sword.

“I am prepared to fight any of them, and all of them.”

She watched as Luna blinked. As Luna’s shoulders slumped, just for a moment. “Doesn’t mean I’ll win, Noctis. I never trained to be a fighter like you. I learned a different way of fighting, and I learned just enough to defend myself. I always had Ravus, and I always had Umbra, and eventually I had Aranea. So I can’t fool myself into thinking I can best my brother in a fight.

“But I am prepared to fight him anyway. Does that answer your question?”

Noctis nodded, once. “Yeah, that’s good enough for me.”

Soft click-click of paws and nails on the move. Wind caught in fur and raised hackles.

Noctis watched as Umbra sat down on Luna’s black boots, and any other time she would have thought the sight cute, but the dire wolf’s bared teeth and its long echoing challenge of a howl stopped that idea dead in his tracks, and she had to smile tightly to herself.

“Get ready for drop!” Aranea yelled from the other end of the airship. “On my mark -- go!”

Noctis whispered, “Come,” and she closed her eyes, and she flung herself out into the tumbling snow, into the trembling sky, and she saw the shapes of woman and wolf falling past her and -- blue and gold, and an all-concealing veil, and sharp corners of wings flashing into existence just out of the corner of her eye -- 

Arms catching her up.

She was looking up into the veil that concealed the silent scream of Anima.

Down, down, with those sharp wings beating a strong wind down into the flurrying snow, into the gathering shadows of daemon packs on the move -- 

She knew exactly where magic had cushioned Luna and Umbra’s fall, from the high shrill shrieking that echoed and echoed from the razor-edged rocks towering past her, the mountain faces looking down on black blood spilled -- 

And as soon as her feet touched the ground she hewed the head of a towering black hulk from its shoulders, and the Aeon that had borne her down leaped to the attack, flashing claws everywhere, and the mountains calling and calling her vengeful screams back --

Noctis smiled, and felt no mirth in it, as she called on her powers, as she pulled weapon after weapon from her power, and she danced among those sharp edges to the song of the rage that rose in her blood.

Did it take a moment? Did it take a lifetime? But she was blinking and the daemons had pulled back in a wide snarling ring, snapping and screaming, and the ground beneath her feet was shaking with the steady oncoming tromp of heavy feet, heavy bodies that had once been human.

“Noctis!” Luna’s scream, distorted torn echoes.

And she reached for her knives and threw them in the direction of that voice, warping and flashing as Anima dissolved into light, and there was just her, speeding to Luna’s side, spear and sword already in her hands as she laid into the front ranks of the advancing MTs that were spewing filth in her armed wake --

Umbra howled, long and high.

Beyond the whirl of his claws and his teeth and his tail, she saw the buildings that jutted out of the surrounding cliff-faces.

“Luna,” she called, and pointed.

“Leave it to me!”

And it was up to her to fight off the blank faces, up to her to fight off the built soldiers, to prevent them from advancing on Luna and breaking the incantation that was rising and rising into a violent pitch, into the groaning chorus of the mountains, into the long low scream of something massive falling -- 

Just in time Noctis banished all her weapons -- just in time she drew the Shield of the Just -- and just this once she couldn’t complain about it, about its weight and its size -- it was more than enough to shelter herself and Luna, more than enough to keep them steady as the world itself seemed to heave around them, in response to the growing shadow of the meteor that was falling towards them, inexorable and unstoppable -- 

“Umbra!” Luna was shouting, “get back here!”

“Fuck!” Noctis cursed, as she saw the dire wolf lunge _toward_ the meteor and the place that it was going to hit -- nothing for it but to throw the shield and to warp after it -- 

Impact.

She felt herself fly through the air, completely without control -- 

Landing, and she desperately wanted to scream her pain -- 

Noctis drew in a pained breath, a shocked breath, and pushed herself up from the ground -- the shadow of Umbra, only just an arm’s-length away -- 

And she dove back into the dirt at the high shriek of gunfire, the scream of machine weapons gearing up for another salvo -- 

“Fuck,” she said again -- she tried to warp to Luna’s side -- 

And when she reappeared in the world she and Luna were surrounded by dozens upon dozens of Niflheim uniforms, soldiers in masks, and she took a shocked moment to be profoundly grateful that Prompto wouldn’t have to see her like this, with nowhere to go -- 

A burly shadow in the white-clad world, stepping forward.

Yanking the veil away from Luna’s face.

Noctis stepped in front of her, crouched to lunge forward.

“Identity confirmed,” one of the other soldiers said in its clipped inhuman voice. “Tenebrae. Oracle. Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.”

Noctis hissed. “You have no right -- ”

And the soldier who had unmasked Luna -- took off his own faceplate, revealing -- the face of a man.

Just a man, with frightened eyes, with a scruff of a beard, with his mouth drawn into something almost like a smile.

Movement all around -- Noctis hissed again, turned, trying to see all the soldiers at once --

One after the other, faceplates falling to the ground, revealing human faces.

Lowered eyes.

And the rising whisper: “Oracle. Oracle. Lady Oracle.”

“What?” Noctis asked. Shimmer of her power, just out of reach, just a breath away from drawing her sword, from drawing one of her Aeons -- 

“Lady Oracle,” said the soldier who had identified her, a scarred gray-haired woman. “We were told to watch for you. To wait for you. And to take you to safety.”

“We are not -- MTs,” the burly man said.

It was strange to see him shift uncertainly on his feet, when he was dressed in the black and red armor of Niflheim.

“We are only men and women and living things,” the scarred woman said. “And we are loyal to you.”

“How can that be?” Luna asked. “Tenebrae is the thorn in Niflheim’s foot. Tenebrae is the enemy.”

“Not to us. We -- we want this war to end.”

“This war has taken our children,” the burly man said. “This war has taken our future. We want it to end. We need it to end. And we need your power, Oracle, to make that happen.”

“It’s what he said,” the scarred woman said. 

“He,” Noctis said, warily.

“Our leader. We will take you to him.”

“No you won’t!” Noctis yelled. “Have him come here, if he wants to see us!”

“Come,” the burly man said, and grabbed her arm.

“I said: No!”

And Noctis fought back the instinct to summon her weapons and slash at the soldiers all around -- only seized Luna’s shoulder, and the knife at her waist, which she tossed straight up into the air -- 

“Hold on,” she yelled, and she was airborne with Luna clinging to her waist, and she said, “Hit them again!”

Luna looked uneasy. “They were not hostile -- ”

“They still wanted to take you into -- those places!”

Down, down, to the ground, where Umbra had suddenly appeared, where he was suddenly calmly sitting.

Noctis took the full force of the landing, and staggered upright, and said over her shoulder, “Prompto was almost destroyed in one of those places, and I will not allow you to be taken in there, because I will not allow you to be destroyed.”

“Noctis,” Luna began.

“I promise you, Princess of the Lucii, it is the last and furthest thing on my mind, for me to hurt my own.”

Flash of white and red on the move.

Flashing towards her.

Noctis sprang into the air and called her staff into her hand, and swung, preparing to scour the speaker from the very stones and the very snow -- 

“Noctis: NO!”

Luna’s anguished voice.

And the man was looking up, where he had stopped some distance from Luna.

White hair flowing in the wind, and hideous scars crisscrossing his face, and the sleeve of his coat cut away, and Noctis landed and stared at the exposed black metal of his left arm, the gears and the joints and the armature on display.

But he still carried the sword with the moon of Tenebrae on the blade, and he still knelt in deference to his sister.

“Ravus,” Luna was saying, now.

“It’s me, it’s really me,” Ravus said.

Noctis shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Please yourself,” Ravus said.

She watched him turn away from her, and bow his head before his sister, and then she felt her jaw drop when he said, “Cast it, Luna.”

“You can’t be serious,” Luna said, and Noctis could hear the fear threaded into those words.

“I am in earnest,” Ravus said. “You must do it anyway. You must clear away the doubt. If I’m to be of any use to you, you need to cast it.”

“And if you lose your arm? If you fall?”

“Then I will not be in torment.”

Horror in the lines of Luna’s face. “...Even now?”

Ravus only nodded.

“Luna,” Noctis said.

“Noctis,” she said.

“I’ll do it if you won’t.”

And she held her staff out, parallel to the ground. 

“...It is more fitting this way,” Ravus suddenly said. And: “Please grant my humble request, Summoner.”

Noctis ground her teeth. Growled. “Name it.”

“Extend your power to -- them,” and he nodded towards the soldiers who had been surrounding her earlier. 

“I meant to,” she said.

“Noctis,” Luna said.

“Don’t stop me,” she warned.

“I don’t plan to. Only -- take this.”

The staff in Noctis’s hand shivered into nothing as she reached out for the white object that flashed away from Luna.

“All right,” she said, and stepped forward, and the three spear-heads made three spiraling lines into the falling snow as she began -- 

But instead of swinging upwards to call the spirits toward a sending she slammed the tips of the trident down into the ground at her feet -- 

Blue and white light flaring upwards from the point of impact -- and Ravus’s mouth opened in an entirely soundless cry, and he half-rose to his feet -- 

Noctis felt nothing but warmth lapping at her knees, gentle purifying -- but she couldn’t take her eyes off the pain in Luna’s face, the pain that was almost exactly mirrored in Ravus’s -- 

And for the first time in her life, she wanted nothing more to call back the magic that she had cast -- 

Groans, quiet on the air, when the warmth vanished at last, when the blue and white light faded out.

Fallen soldiers. Sobs, and shocked breaths, on and on and on, life restored to those who were suffering.

Ravus lay where he had fallen, Luna and Umbra both anxiously leaning over him.

A shiver ran up Noctis’s spine.

And Ravus suddenly rolled onto his side, coughing violently.

His left arm was still working, somehow, as he braced himself upright.

Noctis met his eyes as best as she could.

And he said, “Thank you.”

Soft sobs, Luna holding him close --

Noctis turned away from them, just in time to see -- 

Scream of engines overhead, overstressed, overheated -- 

Flames devouring the side of the _Highwind_ as it whined and swooped in, far too fast and far too low -- 

Noctis didn’t stop to think. Didn’t stop to breathe. 

“Aranea!” Luna’s scream, that she had somehow left behind, that she had somehow outstripped, far below -- 

Glittering crystal outlines of blue all around her, tumbling in the blue sky, as Noctis pushed herself higher and higher and -- there, there, the airship was falling in flames, and the impact shook all throughout Noctis’s bones -- 

She screamed, and warped towards the pillar of smoke and of flames --

Crashing in the undergrowth far below her -- 

She plunged into the clearing and there was a gasp behind her, a low shocked cry -- 

“Noctis!”

She didn’t hear that voice, that familiar voice -- 

She wanted to fall to her knees.

“Come and get her, little Summoner! Little Master!”

A brief heartfelt curse, spat into the scented wind.

Noctis bared her teeth at the man who stood atop the remains of the _Highwind_ \-- the man who was stepping on the back of Aranea’s neck -- 

“Let her go!” Noctis screamed. “You want to deal with me -- don’t use hostages! You deal with ME, straight up!”

“And where would be the fun in that,” Ardyn Izunia sneered from on high.

“Fun, is it,” Noctis said, and felt the flame of her rage leap until it was white-hot, until she couldn’t see anything else.

But she could still feel, and there were three presences flanking her, and they were warm where they were touching her.

Prompto, and Ignis, and Gladio: bloody and bruised and there with her.

United by their purpose.

“Fun,” she said, again, and closed her eyes.

Power surging through her, slashing out of her, and she couldn’t even remember if she’d said anything, or what she’d said.

All she could remember was the flash of the Royal Arms around her, and the weapons that passed through her hands.

The weapons that passed through her companions’ hands.

She could only remember the flash of consternation in Ardyn’s face as she was suddenly bearing down on him, slashing so fast she pierced his suit -- the rest of the weapons shifting and changing in the others’ hands as they attacked in her wake -- four pairs of hands making light of the work -- four hearts chained together -- four hearts in the fight -- 

And Aranea was behind them. 

Ardyn was before them.

Noctis raised the last sword in her hand. Pointed it at her enemy. “What the fuck is it going to take to kill you,” she snarled.

“Many have tried, little Summoner, and as you can see -- none have succeeded!”

“They weren’t trying hard enough.”

Laughter, high and mocking, and she ground her teeth, reached for her knife -- 

“And you think you could hurt me with that? When the arms of your ancestors have had no effect?”

“He’s really getting on my nerves,” she heard Prompto mutter, somewhere on her left side.

“We need to hold him down somehow. We need to overpower him.” Ignis, behind her.

That was a good idea, she thought.

“To me,” she whispered.

Flash of Prompto pulling the others backward -- 

Flash of Aranea getting unsteadily to her feet --

Flash of pale hair on the move -- 

And Noctis reached into the heart of her power.

Fell to her knees as Valefor rose over her, silently looming and protective, and she looked up at it and felt the blood from her precipitous fall as it dripped from the corner of her mouth.

“Help me,” she said, “please.”

Pain! Like hooks pulling free of her flesh, like her heart being torn to pieces --

And the shadow and the wings of Valefor were joined by -- 

“Impossible,” she heard Ardyn say, as if from very far away -- 

She looked up and they were there, looking down on her.

Yojimbo, and Anima, and the Sister-Mages, and Valefor.

“Noctis!”

Luna on her right side, and Prompto on her left, and she was braced between them.

To the Aeons, she whispered, “He would destroy me, and take you for his own,” and she flicked her hand weakly at Ardyn.

Roaring shook all the trees all around her, and she thought maybe the others covered their ears, but she just looked up, mute now, pleading now.

The rush of the Aeons flying away from her --

The hollow beneath her heart that opened wider and wider as they moved farther away --

“No!”

She barely had the strength to raise her head -- to see Ardyn fall back before the Aeons, her Aeons -- 

“Noctis,” someone whispered from very close by. “Come on, hold on.”

A hand to hold.

“Here,” said another voice. “Oh, shit, yeah that’s good.”

A shoulder to lean on.

The voices of the ones who stood with her.

And she almost felt it, like hope unlooked-for, like light rising, like the sun breaking free of the storm -- 

“I am a god!”

Noctis coughed, loudly, once, and it nearly threw her down to the ground.

Again the wash of blood on her tongue, thick and choking -- 

“No no no no no,” she heard a voice say, and didn’t know it was hers --

The fog in her eyes clearing just long enough to see as Ardyn shed -- layers -- 

“Oh, _no_ ,” she thought she heard Ignis say.

Shadow rising from the mangled and trampled ground, a shadow of red eyes.

“Did I allow you to think that you could defeat me? My apologies. Perhaps the time is now, to introduce myself properly.”

“No,” she heard Luna whisper.

“Don’t look, Noct, don’t look,” Prompto was saying.

Noctis coughed again, and looked up.

The massive shape of Ardyn, the shadow of him, growing and growing as though to engulf her, to engulf those who were with her -- 

And she began to scream, as one by one the roiling shadow of Ardyn consumed her Aeons, consumed the power that they had placed in her, the power that linked them to her -- 

Screaming until her voice gave out, and still the horror of it, still the pain of it, overwhelming, and she almost blacked out and -- 

“I can’t lose her, Lunafreya!”

Who was that, holding her?

“If you don’t want to lose her -- step away from her!”

Who was that, standing over her?

“I’m so sorry,” said that voice, “I am so sorry -- ”

Flash of white, flash of three sharp heads, flash of -- 

Noctis opened her eyes to light exploding from her chest.

Light and power exploding from -- 

Luna. Luna’s trident. 

The Oracle’s trident.

Light of the trident that had emerged from her chest -- 

She took a deep clean breath, and felt the length of the trident, driven clean through her --


	12. ascension

She remembered: the looming shadow of Ardyn Izunia, and the high screaming cackle of his laugh.

The raw wounds in her heart as her Aeons were torn away from her, ripped away from where they had lain at the heart of her strength, consumed in Ardyn’s shadows.

The tears and the rage and the fear in the faces all around her.

And she remembered the light of Luna’s trident, piercing her --

There was no smell of blood here.

There was no pain here.

There was nothing here, and she felt that she was a presence without a body, without a physical anchor -- 

But just by thinking of it she could see her own self appearing once again, tatters of light and energy weaving together into -- her hands and her feet, her body, the clothes that she was wearing --

“Hello,” Noctis called, and there were no echoes, no voices to answer -- 

Except for the woman-shape who was standing, suddenly, at her side.

Familiar. Why was she familiar? Dark hair, pale skin -- and eyes that never opened.

“I know you,” Noctis said.

“And I you,” the woman said. “I was Lunafreya’s adviser until she took on the responsibilities of her journey. Gentiana. Do you remember me? We have met before.”

“I was a child, wasn’t I?” Noctis regarded her with a wary eye. “I was -- no more than hip-high on you then. And Luna and I have grown up and you still look exactly the same.” How her hands itched, suddenly, for a weapon. “Something’s wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“My weapons,” she said. “My staff and my sword at the very least. I can’t -- I can’t even feel them. Where -- what is this place?”

“I do not think I understand. You draw weapons from -- where?” 

“Power,” Noctis said, haltingly. “The power that lives within me. The power that was placed in me.”

Gentiana tilted her head towards her shoulder. “Power placed in you by the Astrals, correct?”

Twitch of Noctis’s hand. “Yes. That. How do you know?”

Was Gentiana smiling? “Why, it’s common knowledge, here in this place.”

“Which is?” A moment’s thought, and then she added, “Can you get me out of here? I need to get out of here. I need to -- to find Ardyn. Ardyn Izunia. You have to know him. He opposes you, and Luna. I need to find him, and I need to find some way of defeating him.” Rage, bitter on her tongue. “He took my Aeons from me, and I mean to get them back.”

“Your Aeons. He took them from you, you say? That seems careless.”

Noctis ground her teeth together. Tried to be respectful, but the words came out with an edge anyway. “And you’re making fun of me, aren’t you? Repeating the things I say? Well let me know if you know any better. Let me know if you can do any better -- then you can deal with Ardyn and I can sleep. So tired, I’m so fucking tired -- ”

“You cannot rest until your task is done,” Gentiana said. “Until your great task is done.”

She did round on Gentiana, then. “How do you know that? How do you know I have a great task?”

“I am of those who gave it to you.”

And before Noctis could get out the strangled “What?”, the outlines of Gentiana in this strange blank world shivered and vanished, changing into --

Into deep blue and white.

White hair and blue skin, and eyes opening to reveal intricate traceries of snowflakes, and jewelry draped all over her body.

Where had she seen this form before -- but the question hardly rewarded asking, with the snow that suddenly formed on Noctis’s exposed skin, on the hems of her skirts. With the cold that suddenly sank into her, stealing the very heat of her heart -- 

“Shiva,” she said, her teeth wildly chattering, and -- “You were her all along? Gentiana?”

The woman -- no, the Astral -- nodded, once. “I was her all along. Or Gentiana was the form that I wore so that I could walk unnoticed among humans.”

“Why did you need to do that?”

And Noctis remembered, suddenly and vividly, rolling on the floor with Luna’s puppy dogs, and one or more of them fetching up against Gentiana’s shoes.

Against Shiva’s.

“You’ve been watching Luna all this time?”

“It is the Oracle’s task to communicate with the Astrals, is it not? Then does it not make sense that an Astral would take on the form of a mortal, in order to communicate with him or with her?”

“And -- I’m not the Oracle. I’m the Summoner. You don’t speak to me. I -- I summon you, or some of you, or all of you.”

“Yes, the knowledge that you received from Ramuh. Or you might be more comfortable if you refer to him as Ixion.” Shiva nodded. “And why do you summon us?”

“Because you can get me through the obstacles in my path. In the path of my great task.”

“And what is your great task?”

“I -- ” She fell silent.

“I do not think you know the answer, not truly.”

Was it just her imagination, or did Shiva’s smile crack, just a little?

A new presence, looming over her.

Red skin and dark hair, and luminous yellow eyes.

“I was hoping to help her along. I was hoping for her to come to an organic understanding of what it is she has to do,” Shiva was saying.

“No time. You are leading her along by the hand. Why would you do such a thing?” 

“Ifrit,” Shiva said.

Noctis would sit, if she could, and bruise her backside in doing so.

This place -- was the Astral realm.

“Shiva,” Ifrit was saying, then, in a voice that rattled through Noctis’s bones. “Why do you need to explain things to her?”

“We chose her. We cannot abandon her as a result of that choice.”

“Is it not enough that we must cede control of our abilities to her, or to those of her kind? Is it not enough that we must subject ourselves to her whims -- ”

“If saving lives is a whim, then I’ll keep having it,” Noctis snapped, suddenly. “If saving my world’s very existence is a whim, then maybe you should be, I don’t know, telling me to hang on to it! Are you even listening to yourself? You’re hurting because Summoners exist, who exist to be -- what, a bridge between you and the world that you created? You’re hurting because Summoners can use your powers to change the world that they live in? Then -- then why do Summoners exist?”

“Noctis,” she heard Shiva say.

But her mind was already working.

“Summoners,” she whispered. “A great task. One of the rarest of the great tasks. And great tasks fall to -- fall to my family, fall to the Lucii. Every generation of my family! You’ve taken the person who was named heir and you’ve -- you’ve driven them to do something, and you’ve driven them to do that thing until, until their very last breath. _We take oaths to live and die pursuing our great tasks!_ Why -- why have you singled us out? Why have you chosen us? Nothing special about my bloodline, nothing special about those of my family, and yet we’re the one you break on your commands?”

She looked up.

Shiva met her eyes, impassive.

Ifrit was shaking his head.

The old man that Noctis had only met in the course of one devastating night, when she had stood among half a dozen massive mobile armors with the Niflheim crests burning lurid red on their chests, and she’d found herself calling down the mother and father of all lightning storms onto their heads, only distantly remembering to tell the others to duck, to find some kind of shelter -- 

The others.

“Oh fuck,” she whispered.

The old man who stood off to the side continued to glower at her. 

“Why does it have to be a member of the bloodline of the Lucii,” she said, softly at first. “Are we all -- are we all noble? Are we all selfless? Are we all -- good? I -- I can’t believe that. I can’t believe it for a moment. We were -- we were never paragons! We could never have been paragons! And there are so many other human beings out there -- I found the human beings in Niflheim, real human beings who only wanted for the war to end because it wasn’t making sense, did it ever make sense? Didn’t you create them, too? What made me and mine more deserving of your power, and them less so?

“What made me and mine deserve the burden of the great tasks, us and us alone?”

“You are asking questions for which there are no answers,” the Astral in the form of the old man was saying.

“Wrong,” Noctis hissed. “Wrong. I’m asking questions you don’t know how to answer, is more like it. I’m asking questions you never had to answer before. No one else has ever had the chance to ask these questions. Well I’m sorry, I’m literally the last of my bloodline, and these questions have fallen to me to ask! Tell me,” and she could feel tears welling up in her eyes. “Tell me: did it ever occur to you to find other families, other beings, other generations, to give them -- if not great tasks then suggestions like great tasks?”

“Oracle.” A high angry wail, that came from the woman wrapped in a gray-green mantle. “Oracle exists. Great responsibility.”

“One? One other bloodline? No, no, you’re still not getting it!”

“Have a care,” the woman cried. “You speak to one who is not on your side.”

“None of you are on my side, and none of you give a shit about my side, as far as I’m concerned,” Noctis snapped back. “You have all been content to take my family, to take Luna’s family, and to use us as your playthings. And you never thought that there were people who could have done the tasks with her and me -- who would have _volunteered_ to take the tasks -- ”

“None were worthy,” and the words sounded like blades clashing together.

Noctis glared up at the tall form wreathed in massive swords. 

“And you just said: that which you created is not worthy of you. No,” she laughed, rage rising in her with every breath. “Are you even listening to yourself? You’re not. Making. Sense. You created this world. This universe. You created my existence and my bloodline. You created Luna and her bloodline. And you also created everything else, everyone else, and -- you created things that were not, after all, worthy of you? Then why are you sustaining yourselves on their prayer? On their belief? Why else would -- would they pray to you -- and you take that prayer and you keep on going and you also believe that those who pray to you are not worthy! What a fucking joke!”

One more presence, one last presence, silent.

One more to judge her, and now they were all here.

Appearances mattered, or they didn’t: and she turned away. Slapped angrily at her own tears.

Shoulders up, she thought.

Walk tall, she thought.

And she turned to them, to all the Astrals, lined up in judgment over her.

Shiva. Ifrit. Ramuh. Leviathan. Bahamut. Titan.

“I am the vessel you created and made ready for these times,” she said. “I am the Summoner you created for these days, the weapon you created to stand against your foe.”

Ifrit narrowed his eyes.

It was more than enough confirmation for her.

“Ardyn Izunia. He’s a god, he says. And he’s right, or he’s almost right, isn’t he? A god to challenge all of you. A god to defeat all of you. He’s strong enough and he’s got an army that not even you might be able to prevail against. And so -- you take me and you place your power in me and -- you don’t even believe that I’m worthy of the task. You don’t even feel that I can do it. I don’t blame you. I can’t believe in myself, either, some days.”

Was that a sneer on Leviathan’s mouth?

If it was, then Noctis felt justified in sneering back. “You place your powers in my bloodline, and you exalt my foremothers, my forefathers, to act in your name -- to act as your representatives in the world of the living -- and you don’t believe in any of us at all. Then why haven’t you revoked your grace? Why haven’t you cast me and mine down? Why couldn’t we have been ordinary?”

“And who would act for us?” Shiva asked.

“Literally anyone else. Literally everyone else,” and Noctis didn’t know why she wanted to weep, again. “I -- you have surely been watching me. Then you must have seen my -- my friends! My allies! They went on my path willingly! Why not give them your grace outright? Why not give them the same power, in the same measure? The only reason I’m still on my path is because of them -- they have literally carried me on those days when I couldn’t stand -- and you couldn’t even see fit to give them some thread of the power I must carry within me.

“What makes them unworthy? What makes them flawed? Are they flawed and I’m not and I’m only kidding myself that I’m not -- perfect? I’m not perfect, and I know that I’m not. I am here, after all, and I’m calling you out, and if I were the perfect heir, if I were the perfect princess, I would go meekly on the road you’ve placed before me, to the death that awaits me.

“And instead here I am, and you know what -- fuck you,” and Noctis laughed, and fell to her knees. “Fuck you. I’m tired. I’m so tired. And I want to give up on this. I want to give up on all of this,” and she bowed her head. “I’m tired, and I -- was this where you found my father at last? On his knees at the end of his great task, eaten by it, destroyed by it? I can’t, I can’t be the same as him. As every other king and queen of the Lucii, every single one of us destroyed at the end, every single one of us consumed by you at the end -- and you don’t even think we’re worthy of the tasks that you’ve thrown onto our shoulders.”

How she wished for her knife, now.

She would draw it along her skin, and dig deep into her veins, and -- end it, here and now.

And -- magic was will, wasn’t it, and this was the realm of the Astrals and their will -- and she the one who could channel their will?

Spark at her fingertips, hot enough to burn.

Drops of blood on her skin.

“You will not do this,” Bahamut said, suddenly.

“You don’t command me,” she said. “You are not worthy to command me. Only I can command myself. And I -- I want to rest, I want to put this burden down, before I, too, am crushed beneath it, as all of my family were crushed beneath theirs. As all of Luna’s were crushed beneath theirs.” 

Ice, crackling, around her hand, as if to restrain her. As if to keep her in her place.

“Let me go,” Noctis said, quietly. “Let me fall.”

“And you would leave the task unfinished?” Shiva asked.

That was a good idea, but -- 

Noctis grinned, then, and she knew it didn’t reach her eyes, and it was a little satisfying to see the way Ifrit suddenly moved his hand, as though to reach for a weapon that wasn’t there.

“No,” she said, “you know what, I can do better than just leave the task unfinished.” She cast the power in her hand away. “You know what, I can do so much better. Take me to Ardyn,” she said. “Take me to Ardyn. I’ll fucking throw my great task at his feet -- maybe that’ll give him the power he needs and he can do whatever he wants with me, destroy me or what, or I’ll destroy myself -- but first I’ll give him all the grace you’ve piled onto me and he can use that to wreck you all, and I and mine can rest -- ”

“You will do no such thing,” Titan roared. 

“The only way you can stop me is to end my existence, is to end my bloodline’s existence, right here and now. Can you do that? Can you bring yourselves to do that? No, no, I don’t think so. So I can do it, and I will do it, since I command myself and I’m the only one who can command myself. I’ll do it, I’ll throw myself at that asshole’s feet, my life bleeding out and I’ll laugh while I do it because at least I made that choice. I will -- unless you do as I ask,” she said. 

“You cannot make bargains with us.”

“Yes, I know, it only works one way. You force a bargain that is no bargain on us, yes, I know. But watch me anyway, and maybe you’ll feel sorry for all of a few minutes before Ardyn eats all of you.”

And she turned her back on them.

There was no point in walking away in this place, but she would feel better if she didn’t have to be looking at them -- so she placed one foot in front of the other, and again, and again.

“Sorry, Noctis,” she said, to the image in her mind of the man who slept in crystal. “Sorry it had to be like this. I guess I couldn’t find the right way.”

“Summoner,” said a quiet voice behind her.

She didn’t turn around. “Shiva.”

That presence beside her, troubled. “You would not have been able to find your way out of here.”

“I had enough to hurt myself with,” and she gestured with her still-bleeding hand. “If I can do that, then I can find a way out.”

“You truly would cast it all away, to punish us.”

“I haven’t punished you yet,” she pointed out. “I’ll do what I said if there is no other way. If you can’t even bring yourselves to listen to what I had to offer.”

“I am listening,” Shiva said, after a long moment.

“Just you?”

“I -- ”

Noctis stopped, and folded her arms over her chest, and finally looked at the presence next to her.

“I must listen for them. I must speak for them,” Shiva said, after a long time.

“Don’t worry,” Noctis said. “You’ll like this. You’ll say, why didn’t we think of this earlier? All I want is: you take the power and the grace of the Lucii, the power and the grace of the Oracle -- you gather that power and you give it to -- to everyone. To everything. All that lives, all that breathes, all that wants to survive and carry on. The men and the women and the children, those who live now, and those who will live in the hereafter. Give them all, give _us_ all, the grace and the strength to change the world.”

“Even to those who support the powers of Niflheim? Even to those who willingly follow that lord of daemons?”

“Even to them. We all have that choice. We all have that ability to make a new choice. We want to survive, and we want to see a future of some kind. Give us the grace to make that happen. Give all that power to all of us. Not to just one man. Not to just one woman. Not to one person, but to all.”

“I -- I cannot say yes or no to you now,” Shiva said, after a long pause. “We must confer.”

“Then I’ll keep walking,” Noctis said.

And she tried to smile, as she turned away.

She felt power, building and building at her back.

One foot in front of the other, and her head held high.

The darkness closed in on her, and she walked tall, even as she couldn’t draw any more breaths, even as she suddenly fell -- 

And there were voices, suddenly, voices that she could hear, voices that she knew.

Bony knees beneath her head, and hands holding hers, and rising and falling whispers.

Noctis opened her eyes to a blur of blonde hair and blue eyes turned away from her, to swirling freckle-shadows.

“Prom,” she whispered.

Shift beneath her and above her, shocked, and -- his eyes, meeting hers.

“Noctis,” she heard him say -- and on the heels of that word, of her name, awe.

“She’s alive,” said a voice at her right.

The pressure of leather and of bare fingertips on her skin.

“Noctis, don’t get up yet -- ”

She sat up, and clutched at her heart for a moment.

The movement of Luna’s shoulders, pulling back suddenly.

“What have you done?”

And she blinked, and looked up at Ravus, at the worry in his face. “What do you mean?”

Prompto’s dear face, leaning close, and the shape of his camera in his hands. “I can show you.”

She blinked, when she heard the shutter go off.

And he turned the camera around to show her the viewfinder.

Her face, filling up the frame.

Noctis touched her left cheek. “I look like -- that.”

“What did you do,” Luna asked, only a little more composed.

“I made a bargain,” Noctis said, and nothing felt different in her body.

But there it was, in the photograph that Prompto had taken.

Her right eye: familiar blue.

Her left eye: luminous purple.

The bargain she’d offered, the bargain that the Astrals had accepted: it glowed, there, in her eye.


	13. the power of two

She stood on the shattered paving of the makeshift landing pad, and threw a hand up to cover her face from the dust and the ashes that heaved on the wind, on the gale that was roaring around her ears.

Blurring into the sky, shaking from side to side: a Niflheim drop ship, but one that would not be spitting her enemies out and onto the ground. One that would not be maneuvering around to fire on her. 

The rising howl of its engines as it clawed up and up and into the dark evening sky, and the blinding beams of the searchlights studding its blocky frame, and she saw it vanish into the murk and the clouds and it was strange to be seeing it off, when she had been so used to ducking away from clumsy shadows shaped so much like it, running and hiding or else standing her ground to wait for the inevitable clash with men and women in armor, faces sealed up behind black blank masks -- 

Static whine of the radio on the dashboard, the most recent addition to the Regalia: “Rangefinder test. Frequency test. Regalia, if you’re receiving this, we require a response.”

A hand snatching at the comm unit before she could even fully turn to address it: “ _Highwind the Second_ , Regalia is receiving. You’re coming in loud and clear.”

Squelch on the line that sounded like a snort, that sounded like Aranea and the prelude to a string of four-letter words.

She let herself fall back into the shotgun seat, and she closed the door, and she turned towards Prompto, towards the conversation that he was still having with a now-distant Ignis. 

“ -- dezvous in a few days, if all goes as planned.”

“We’ll be there, even if we had to fight daemons every step of the way, I think you know we’re good for that. On the other hand, when did things ever go to plan?” Prompto was rolling his eyes though there was no one to see him do it. “Why do you think we stopped making plans? No, Iggy, you don’t get to deny it: I know you stopped making plans a long time ago. Can’t plan when things change so quickly. Can’t see past the next few hours, can’t see past the next few days. Planning’s becoming so much useless effort.”

“...Not if the remains of our old plans can still be used in new plans.”

“Mmmyeah, sometimes we’re lucky, right? But like I said. Sometimes there’s nothing else we can do except act. No plans. No prep. We can’t always have that time. All we can do is think on our fucking feet.”

“Yes. I do not know when you became so wise.”

“You’re just a mean old ass, Ignis.”

“I’m hardly old, Prompto.” 

A quiet cough.

Noctis clamped her teeth shut around the sigh that threatened to escape. 

“Be safe, both of you,” Ignis said, next.

She wrapped her hand around Prompto’s, and brought the comm unit -- and his hand -- up to her mouth so she could speak. “I don’t think it’s even possible for you to stop worrying about me,” she said, gently. “Just as I can’t stop worrying about you. But right now -- just give me time. Give us time. Please?”

“If you had asked for time off from your great task,” Ignis began, and there was a crack in his voice that wasn’t just static.

She chuckled, soft and watery. “Oh, that’s right. We’ve had this conversation before.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t take too long,” she promised. “In the meantime -- please do what you can, and please tell Ravus to do what he can. We’ll need help. We’ll need to use everything and everyone that we can.”

“I will relay your message,” Ignis said. 

“See you,” she said, quietly, and she clicked the unit off, and put it back on its hook on the dashboard.

Prompto’s hand in hers, warm and real.

The wind died to a quiet moan.

She listened to his breaths next to her: inhale, exhale, long quiet sighs.

“We can go,” she said, and made herself uncurl her fingers, so he could take his hand back.

He didn’t take his hand back.

“You just asked them for time.”

“I did,” she said.

“So I’m not hurrying. So you’re not.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Movement, rustling, and she was turning her head, she was looking over at him, but he was quicker and he was already leaning across the console, and he was already wrapping her up in his arms. 

She breathed out, and told herself she wasn’t going to cry, and she leaned helplessly into his touch.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me, Noctis.”

But it was like picking at a scab. It was like worrying at a loose tooth: the chafing raw edges of the wound in her spirit, the yawning absence of her Aeons that she couldn’t entirely forget, or fill with her own power.

And the ache only grew and grew when she thought about the months of the journey, the months on the road: and she’d started out entirely ignorant of what it would be like to carry such a fierce power in her, the bright power of an Aeon curled around her heart so that she was constantly living in its shadow, her heart constantly beating in time with its living strength. 

One after the other she’d let them in: Valefor and Anima and the Sister-Mages and Yojimbo.

And she had never realized what they were doing to her, how they were changing her, until she had so suddenly lost them.

She did weep then, quietly, breathlessly.

“Noctis,” Prompto was saying, beside her.

“Come on,” he was saying.

Hands, gently braced around her wrists, leading her.

Through her tears she saw her own feet moving as he pulled her gently out of the passenger seat. As he guided her onto the hood of the Regalia -- she hitched backwards, just a little, so she could sit on the metal, that gave and groaned a little as he sat down next to her, and bumped her shoulder with his.

“Hurts,” she gasped, and “Not you. Not something you did. It’s my heart. Sorry.”

“Shut up,” he said, very quietly. Very gently. “What are you apologizing for?”

“All my life I lived without Aeons, and then I had them and then I lost them and I’m crying because I was an idiot and I’ve lost them,” she said, in a tear-soaked rush.

“Why are you apologizing,” he said, again. 

“Sounds silly,” she said.

“No, Noct, it doesn’t. It sounds like you’re talking about friends.”

“Am I?” She sniffled and tried to stop crying and only succeeded in sobbing even more. “Is that what they are?”

“Would you cry for Aranea? For Ravus? If something happened to them?”

She blinked, and looked at him, and tried to glare. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I would. I already did. They’re not my guardians, they’re Luna’s. Doesn’t mean they’re not that important to me. They are, because she is.”

“And the Aeons were closer to you than that. Are closer to you than that. I never figured out where you were keeping them,” he said. “But wherever they were, I knew they were closer to you than your friend’s guardians. Right?”

“And if I were a better Summoner I wouldn’t have lost them the way I did,” she said.

“What, no, that wasn’t what I was trying to get at.” He was scratching the back of his head. “I meant -- I think I see why you’re crying. I think it isn’t silly if you cry about them.”

“It will be,” she said, “if that’s all I do. Cry about them, I mean. If that’s all I do, then I’m doing it wrong.”

“Well we’re not yet on our way to Ardyn.” Was he spitting, onto the broken stones? “Ugh. I don’t want to be near him ever again. Lord of daemons and shit, right? But we’re going to have to. In order for you to do the thing. The thing where you kick his ass so hard he never gets to recover.”

“I want to do so much more than that,” she said. “But I don’t know how to.”

“Astrals,” he said, after a moment.

“I don’t know about that either,” she said. “Just this.”

She tapped her left cheek. 

He started mumbling next to her. 

She blinked again, and looked at him. “What?”

His hands, rising to cover his face -- but not quickly enough for her to miss the blush that she could see, spreading up to his temples, to his hairline, visible even beneath the dark sky.

“Prom.”

“Noct,” she heard him say, muffled.

“What is it.”

“Your eyes,” he muttered.

She stared at him for a moment, and the sudden chill that overtook her seemed to freeze even the tears that were still on her cheeks.

She tried to be understanding, when she asked, “It bothers you? My eyes?”

He started, violently.

She closed her eyes and looked away. “I didn’t ask for it,” she muttered. “Sorry -- ”

“No, no, that’s not it,” he said.

“It unsettles you,” she said.

“Not the way you think.”

His hand on her shoulder, warm and firm. “Look at me.”

She turned toward him, but didn’t open her eyes.

“...Stubborn,” she heard him say, and -- 

Sweet fleeting touch, soft against the corners of her eyes: left side, right side.

And one more, pressed right against her forehead, and she knew the shape of his mouth very well now, the way he kissed her, the way he lingered against her. 

His quiet words: “I can’t stop looking at you. But being around everyone else, well, they know how weird I am, and they all know how I feel about you. Luna -- Luna was telling me, you know.” Low laughter, brief and real. “She was telling me she’d take all the magic in the world and hunt me down, if I ever broke your heart.”

“And yet I’m the one who keeps breaking yours,” she said, and she opened her eyes. Caught at his collar. Tried to hold him close. “I -- I keep doing all these things. Big stupid silly strange things.”

“And how is that a bad thing? You are -- you are different and you are always becoming different. Can’t -- can’t I want that? Can’t I need that?”

“You -- want me like this?”

He was laughing, softly, and kissing her cheeks. “Of course I’d have problems if I suddenly woke up next to you and I couldn’t recognize you any more. That would be -- that would be a disaster for us, wouldn’t it? But -- you remember where I was, what I was, before I got to Lucis. Before I found you. Everything and every day the same. We were numbers and not names. We were all identical. And I’ve had enough of that for ten lifetimes. Twenty lifetimes. I would rather wake up to you, changing or not changing. I would rather be with you, whatever happens to you.” 

She blinked at him.

And he blinked back and seemed to realize what he was saying, and he coughed, and looked down. “Um. That is. If you don’t mind. If you don’t think I’m being weird again.”

“You, weird?” she said, and she smiled when the words came out mostly teasing. “No. No, Prompto, you’re almost normal compared to me.”

“I like how you say I’m almost normal.” He was smiling, too. “I like how you say you’re not normal.”

“I really am not and you know it.”

“Yes I do. I can see it in your eyes. Even without the purple, I saw it. I can see it. And -- here I am,” he said.

“Here you are,” she said.

Wind, calling in long lonely notes.

And she saw the flash of a single star in the sky.

The night sucked away the bright blue of his eyes, but it couldn’t erase him, not from her sight or from her mind.

No point in fighting the impulse, she thought, and she pulled him close.

“Noctis,” she heard him whisper against her mouth, in the very instant before she kissed him.

He was pulling her close, he was pulling her into his lap, and she sighed softly and kissed him again, and her hands were trembling as she held on to him -- 

His fingers winding into her hair.

She shivered. 

“Cold?” he murmured, against the corner of her mouth.

“You feel good,” she said, helplessly.

Soft huffing laughter.

And he was pulling away, and she heard herself make a dismayed sound.

“What,” she asked.

Again that flush in his face. “You. Me. Someplace safe. Not here.”

Oh. 

She felt the answering heat spread in her own skin, spurring her to the driver’s side of the Regalia. “Get in,” she said, as she buckled her seat belt, as she started the car.

His hand on her knee was a shivering welcome weight, even as she opened up the Regalia’s throttle, as the engine roared beneath her and the road ahead unspooled into night-dark shadows.

Wind in her hair, burning against her skin.

And the presence of Prompto next to her, the unmistakable shape of him, still with her, even here.

Long lonely highway before them, and the snow-peaked mountains far behind: she turned onto a twisted hairpin stretch of cliffside road and she couldn’t hear the sea far below for the roaring in her ears.

His eyes were quicker still than hers: the tug on her skirt and the arm he flung out the window. “There,” he said, and pointed.

Runes, glowing softly.

Soft blue glow all around as she slowed down and finally came to a stop, enough for her to see the way his eyes were focused on her.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

He was shaking his head, and he was smiling as he hit the switch on the console that would retract the roof, and now the faint light of the multiplying stars overhead was falling into his hair, into the lines of his face.

She watched him kick out of the seat and climb into the back of the car. Watched him unlace his boots and undo the bandanna he wore around his arm -- the cuff that he still wore on his wrist -- his gloves and his belt -- 

“What are you doing,” she asked, and the words were a little strangled as she watched his hands.

“Getting comfortable.”

“For what?” But she was already following his lead: she was double-checking that the car was locked in park, and she was exiting the car only to enter it again.

Prompto was leaning over her lap, running his fingertips down past her knees, down to her boots.

The intimacy of his touch, the sureness of him -- 

She swallowed, and couldn’t breathe.

Knots coming undone on the laces. Her boots thumping to the floor, on her side of the seat. Her socks slithering after.

“Up we go,” he was saying, as he sat up again -- but his hands were firm on her ankles as he moved, warm, pulling her feet onto his thighs.

“I -- I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said, shivering at the feel of his calloused thumb against the arch of her foot.

“Don’t know yet, couldn’t tell you,” and she thought she heard a hitch in his breath. A soft bubble of laughter. “Just -- I don’t want to think about anything. I don’t want to do anything. Just want to feel.”

“Me,” she said, in a very small voice.

The smile that quirked up the side of his mouth was the only answer she got.

And then she forgot to breathe completely, when he bent to press an open-mouthed kiss to her knee. 

His name fell from her mouth, almost unconsciously.

The shape of his cheek moving against her skin, and she wasn’t surprised when he looked up with that soft thoughtful smile on his mouth, the soft thoughtful smile that he tended to get when they were doing this -- 

This: where his hand was rising to her shoulder, gently coaxing her to slide down. Down, until she was lying on her back, and he was poised on his knees over her.

She had to gasp when he leaned in close, when he brushed his mouth against her throat. “Keep your eyes open.”

“What are you doing,” she began, but the words failed her again when he licked into the hollow between her collar bones. 

“Look at me,” he was saying, right against her damp skin. “Look at me.”

His hand at the seam of her dress, easily finding the hidden zipper, and dragging it down, down, down.

The press of his fingers against her skin as he stripped her of her shirt and her shorts and her briefs.

She wanted to close her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by him in all his clothes looming over her, and her in nothing but her skin and the glow of the runes from below, the stars from above.

“Keep looking,” he said.

She wanted to say his name -- but the look in his eyes took her breath away.

Closer and closer he came, his mouth on hers and coaxing her to open up to him, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung on for dear life: the kiss growing hotter and hotter, and she could feel the need that was coming off of him in waves -- 

“Good?” he asked, when he laughed and pulled away.

“Come back,” she whined.

“I will. Maybe. Later. Watch,” he said.

His hands and his mouth on her skin, tracing wandering circles, slow sweet torment: the curve of her shoulder, the inside of her elbow, the veins in her wrist. The curve of her breast, below her nipple where the swell of her turned inward. The softness around her navel. 

When he kissed her thigh she threw her head back and keened out something that was almost his name.

And he huffed out a pleased sound against her. “Yeah? I know you like that.”

“You’re going to kill me,” she moaned.

“And you’re going to watch me do it,” he said, punctuating the words with a slow wet stripe licked up from her knee to her hip.

She almost screamed, almost arched up from the leather. “Tickles!”

“I know.”

And he was pulling away, just a little, just enough space between them so he could finish undressing, until he was as naked as she was, until he was carefully draping himself over her and she groaned, hauled him closer -- 

“Don’t want to crush you,” he was muttering against her cheek.

“I don’t fucking care,” she said, arching up and rolling her hips against him, laughing low in her throat to feel the hard hot length of him, to feel the slick at the very tip, to know that she’d caused him to feel that way.

“Gods, Noct, you feel so good,” and his words were gasps against her cheek, helpless puffs of air on her skin.

“Prompto,” she moaned softly.

“I wanted to take my time,” he said.

“No? Please?”

“Fucking -- yeah, I can’t say no, can I,” but he was laughing as he said it.

Laughing as he stuck his fingers into his own mouth and then slid them down the length of her body, down to where she burned for him, wet and needy -- 

“Fuck,” he said again as he stroked her open, and she couldn’t blush, couldn’t feel any shame: this was her, reacting to him, where they couldn’t hide from each other, where it was impossible for them to lie to each other, and he was pressing tight circles into her, until she thought she would break -- she thought she was saying his name, she thought she was begging him -- 

Shift in him over her, and she braced her feet, and he was sinking into her in one perfect stroke, and she could no longer see the stars or the sky -- too lost in him, the lines in his face twisted so beautifully --

“Move, move,” she moaned. “Please please Prompto please.”

It was so easy, so easy, to get lost in the movement of her body and his -- 

Her name falling from his lips again and again as he moved, as she moved to meet him -- 

He’d wanted her to watch him: so she struggled to keep her eyes open -- 

“Fuck, fuck, you have no idea what you look like right now,” he gasped, and he was moving faster and harder, now, bottoming out with every thrust, and she couldn’t last, not against this or him, not even if she wanted to, and falling over the edge of her need into pure mindless climax was shock that scoured through her, that blasted through her -- 

Dimly she heard him call out her name, one more time, and dimly she felt him go perfectly still -- 

She was suddenly aware of opening her eyes. Of the rough tumble of his damp hair tickling her cheeks. The press of his body, still braced over hers.

The soft puff of his breathless laugh against her shoulder. “Lost it too soon.”

“Not what you think,” she laughed back, and she finally peeled her hand from where it was still holding on to his arm, to wipe the tears and the sweat away from her eyes. “I mean, I couldn’t think we’d finished too quickly. I was -- too busy enjoying it.”

“So was I. You’re too good to me,” he said, and she didn’t want to let him go, but he was pulling away and he was pulling out and -- the back of the car smelled like sex, like her and like him.

“That’s my line,” she said, and sighed as she looked around for something to clean up with, and settled on her shirt. 

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t mean it.” 

Sitting up felt like shifting huge rocks, like shifting Gladio, but she managed it -- and she sighed as she leaned into his still-naked shoulder. 

“I don’t know if I convinced you,” he said, suddenly.

She looked at him. “About?”

Swift gesture, as Prompto pointed at his own eyes. “That.”

“What I don’t understand is why you’ve accepted it when I can’t,” she said, and took his hand.

“Maybe it’s my way of returning the favor,” he said, around deep breaths that she felt, riffling her hair. “You don’t blink at this,” and now he was pointing at his exposed tattoo, the hateful letters and numbers in the skin of his wrist. “And now you’re walking around with that eye, and anyone who looks at you knows you’re not like the rest of us, and I know it, and to me it’s just part of you.”

She thought about it for a moment, and then: “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“You deserve it,” he said, simply.

“I should cover it up,” she said.

“Not for me. Not for the others.”

“No, not for any of you.”

“Strategy tomorrow?” she heard him ask, after a moment.

She kissed him on the mouth this time. “Tomorrow. For now: there’s you and me. There’s us.” 

“Sounds good.” He was smiling at her. “Us.”


	14. chosen queen

Hardly had she woken to the sudden flash of lurid red light than she was already throwing off her blankets, already rolling out of bed -- red glint on the edge of her sword as she leaped to the window and pushed it open, and dropped lightly to the ground -- 

The door that led back into the hotel crashed open -- she heard its distant echoes, as she heard the footsteps hastening in her wake -- 

She threw her knives into the night, but not as anchors, not as reference points: every blade flew true, the two she’d carried all this way and the one she’d only acquired yesterday, and three daemon corpses stained the ground with black-rotten ichor and she was twisting into a defensive form, into a cluster of ravening teeth and claws, even as a mismatched sword and a spear blinked into reality in her hands, even as she danced into the dangerous storm of her enemies’ rage --

“Don’t take them all for yourself,” growled the man who was ducking past the reach of her sword, only to seize her by the wrist and throw her into the next cluster of enemies. 

“I thought you liked it when I softened them up for you,” she called as she parried four, five, six blows all aimed at her, as she kicked another fallen corpse out of her path and vanished her weapons, fire in her bare hands instead and everything she touched exploded in a cacophony of screams and instant destruction, leaving her in the center of a ring of corpses.

Leaving her path clear, to the man in the white coat, and she stayed where she was and pointed to the screeching skittering mass of shadows sweeping towards him, and said, “Not tonight.”

Lines of lightning reaching past him, past Ravus, tracery of her power that left him unharmed.

“My thanks.” And the man turned swiftly and lashed out with a night-hued hand to crush the head of the daemon that had been crawling in his direction.

“Clear?” she asked.

“We’re good here, got to sweep to the other side of the building,” the man who had thrown her said. 

“Go,” the man in the white coat said. “I will remain as a sentry, and if I should need your help, then I will call you.”

“Follow me,” Noctis said, and she didn’t wait for Gladio to acknowledge her: only loped forward, listening, and the blood thumped high and hard in her veins as she moved, and she could hear the gunshots and the crack and the cry of magic in the air, as she dashed around the bend in the path -- 

Gladio suddenly leap-frogging ahead of her and crouching down, his hands braced on her knees -- 

She put on a hard burst of speed, enough for her to run up his back, enough for him to launch her straight into the swarming skittering enemies and the world was blurring around the edges, landing with her staff already in her hand, and she fired off bolt after bolt of magic, high whining screeching cries strangled and cut short by her doing, by the others’ doing -- 

And when it was over she planted the end of the staff in the stained grass and leaned on it, and tried to catch her breath.

“Three nights in a row,” Luna was saying, and Noctis was grateful for her shoulder, for her presence. “I never stopped to consider that the situation would fall apart so quickly.”

Noctis sighed, and made a face. “Then we can’t linger. We can’t stop any more. The moment we start moving, we’ve got to make it all the way to Insomnia.”

“That’s still a day away, even with the carrier,” Luna said.

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” and Noctis led the way back to the house, and she had to lean on her staff in order to do so. 

“I cannot be happy with the situation,” Ignis said, once he’d laid on a light breakfast. “You are hurt, we have not slept well, and there is no more time.”

“Three nights, as Luna said,” she muttered, crunching her toast. “I don’t want to think about a fourth night. A fifth night. I’m not here to fight a war of attrition. So the only way forward is for me to take the fight straight to Insomnia, straight to Ardyn.”

“Hold up,” Gladio growled. “Listen to yourself. You’re not here to fight a war. Singular you. The only way forward for you. _Singular you._ What the hell?”

She made a face and pushed her plate away. “You know, I wanted to finish eating that.”

“Then why don’t you? And you can explain yourself at the same time.”

“No, because we’re going to have an argument, and that puts me off,” she said. 

“You, alone, in Insomnia,” Gladio began, with narrowed eyes. 

“Do you think I like the idea?” Noctis struck the table with her fist. “Do you think I want to fight Ardyn alone?”

“Tell us why you must do this.” Quiet click of a teacup meeting its saucer.

She looked up, and met Ravus’s eyes head-on. 

Took a deep breath.

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” she said, eventually. “Prom and I, we spent four nights driving back after you guys, and you were all wondering why we didn’t get into any fights. Then I asked you if you got into any trouble and -- you didn’t. You saw nothing, we saw nothing. Not a sign of daemons until we crossed the borders back into Lucis, and -- well you’ve been here with me for the past three nights, and what do we have to show for it but a fucking wall of dead daemons between us and the highway that will take us straight to Insomnia. All they have to do is run straight here from the Citadel. All they have to do is swarm us, and -- we’re dead and gone and all of this will have been for nothing. So what else is left? What else can we do? I need to get back to the Citadel, I need to deal with Ardyn, and that means I can’t deal with the daemons.

“You have to do that for me.”

Groan near her feet: she looked down into the worried eyes of Umbra. 

“If you don’t like it, imagine how I feel,” she told the wolf.

Looked up again, and stared down the length of the table: Ravus at the foot, and Gladio and Ignis on one side, Luna on the other. 

At the doors: Prompto and Aranea.

He was pale, too pale, all his freckles starkly visible even in the bad light of the room. 

“Fuck,” Luna said, after a long moment. “So he’s got us backed into a corner?”

“Or perhaps that is what he wants us to think,” Ravus muttered, and he, too, had gone ashen.

“Well it’s working,” Aranea said, and cursed a few more times under her breath for good measure.

“I cannot see any other way out of this trap other than -- by Astral intervention.”

“That’s the other problem.” Noctis covered her face with her hands for a moment. 

“The other problem,” Ignis said, far too evenly.

“If he sees me like this he won’t stop to taunt me. He won’t stop to gloat. He won’t stop to make a speech: he’ll simply kill me on the spot,” she said, and pointed at her left eye. “I’m assuming he knows exactly what this means.”

“That’s a fair assumption to make.”

“I -- I need to get close to him, without tipping him off to whatever it is I can do now.”

“ _We_ don’t even know that,” Gladio said, and he finally bowed his head. “ _You_ don’t know. Fucking Astrals.”

“Seconded,” Ravus said.

“We can be pissed off and fall into despair, or we can be pissed off and try to deal,” Noctis said. “And Prompto and I, we -- we tried to come up with something.”

“Which is?” Luna asked, weary now.

She reached for the item that Prompto had pressed into her hand, three nights ago, and that she had been keeping in her pocket ever since.

His black bandanna, that he had worn around his arm for the entire length of the journey.

“What,” Aranea began.

“For the record, we don’t like it,” Prompto said, “and it’s our plan.”

“We don’t have a choice, we have to hear it,” Luna said, around a single angry sob.

Noctis took her hand, briefly, and then pushed up to her feet.

Mimed tying the bandanna around her head.

“I’ll limp out of here, alone,” she said. “None of you will be here.”

Gladio stood, abruptly, and his chair clattered over backward.

She went on. “The daemons will search this house and attempt to overrun it. None of you will be here. And either the daemons will kill me on the spot, or -- and I don’t know why I think this will even happen -- or they will drag me to Insomnia. Drag me to the Citadel. I’ll be a prisoner, and Ardyn can -- taunt me, until he’s done and he tries to kill me -- and that’s when I see what the Astrals have done to me and to my magic.”

Silence. 

Blank faces.

Noctis shook her head, and turned away, and held her hand out to Prompto.

Who reached out to her in return, and couldn’t move away from the door he was still watching out of.

“That’s not a plan,” Aranea said, after a long moment. 

“A pile of risks,” Ravus said. “Risk and conjecture.”

“And it’s all we’ve got.”

Noctis turned, and stared at Luna.

“You could be wrong at literally every point and -- we still don’t have anything better.” Tears in her eyes, that Noctis wanted to brush away. “I couldn’t even begin to guess how his mind works.”

“Assuming he had one,” Ignis muttered, darkly, “aside from the hubris that he seems to be overly fond of.”

“Yes,” Luna said. “And -- you’re trying to exploit it, Noctis?”

She nodded. 

Heard Prompto clear his throat. “We tried to use logic. We tried to use -- the encounters we had with him. When he cornered us on the train he had so many chances to kill us all one by one. But -- he was having too much fun. He was playing with us and he was having too much fun. So Noctis threw me off the train, threw herself off the train, and, well, wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“You had Aeons then,” Gladio growled. “You don’t now.”

“And no clue about the Astrals either,” Noctis said. “Still don’t have anything better.”

“It is just mad enough to work.” Ravus bowed his head. “Or it is just a very long path to your death -- and we fall when you do.”

“And there’s no more time,” Aranea said. “Unless I’m mistaken, that’s dawn out there.”

“Which doesn’t mean much. But -- fuck.” Noctis blinked as Ignis got to his feet. “What choice is left to us? What else can we do?”

“I don’t have any answers,” she whispered, as she crossed to his side. As she reached for his hands. “I don’t have anything to offer you except -- my thanks. For everything you’ve done. I should have said something. I should have said everything. And now this is all I can do. If, if things go bad: don’t kill yourself trying to avenge me.”

“Too late,” he said, and he was pulling her forward, and she didn’t hear him sob because she was already weeping.

Gladio, next: who knelt before her with his shoulders shaking. 

“Thank you,” she said.

Umbra, who nosed sadly at her, who licked her cheek, and turned away. His paws over his nose, covering his eyes.

Aranea’s hands were cold and rough on her shoulders, shaking her violently, and they left bruises on her skin.

Ravus bowed his head, and kept his distance. 

That left Luna, and Prompto.

She drew Luna in and kissed her forehead, long, lingering.

As for Prompto: he was smiling through his tears, and she was smiling through hers.

The circuit was done.

The loop of them all, all of them her friends.

She bowed her head, and said, “Thank you.”

Said, as she opened the door and the faint sunrise light fell onto the step, “Go.”

Backed out the door, and they were the last thing she saw before she tied her blindfold on.

Before she turned around and felt the wan sun’s warmth.

“I’m ready,” and hardly were the words out of her mouth when -- 

“Take her. Burn the house down, and everyone in it.”

The voice that turned her into cold and into fear, that echoed all the way into the deepest places of her heart and of her mind.

Teeth, gnashing.

“You like it?” Ardyn’s voice. “They’ll eat you. A little at a time until we get to the Citadel. Then -- well, I’ll decide then. I’ll throw you into the Crystal. I’ll pierce you with it, and it will be red with your blood. Your cursed blood that runs through my veins too.”

“What,” Noctis said.

“Oh, so no one told you! No one bothered! I’m -- I’m the first of us. The first of _you_! Ardyn Lucis Caelum. Ugh!”

“You?” she asked, and she couldn’t tell where he was with the strange mocking echoes of his voice. 

“I will not be a healer,” Ardyn was hissing. “I was made for more than taking away people’s pain. I was made to command! I should have been a king! I threw my great task in the faces of the Astrals, and look what they did to me: they cursed me! They made me into this corrupted thing! Into this source of darkness! Well then I’ll raze this world, I’ll turn it into dust and they can see how they like it. Do you think they’ll survive, without this Eos? I want to know. I want to know. I’ll destroy you and come for them.”

Why was his voice so strange, so unsteady -- didn’t he hear the echoes? 

The echoes that sounded so much like the Aeons.

Was she hearing them, truly? Were they there, calling to her?

She strained her ears to listen.

Heard the sounds of movement and the daemons’ teeth, closing on her, feeding on her, till she lost count of the wounds, the bleeding lines in her.

The warmth of the sun faded away.

She felt the night closing in on her.

Felt death come, slow, stalking in her footsteps, with every drop of blood that she lost.

She stumbled and she was on her knees, suddenly, and she drew in a shocked breath and she almost recognized the smell of the air, the sound of the world around her: pavement and marble and the blank gazes of the statues that bore the faces of the Lucii.

However Ardyn moved in the world, into and out of it: she was almost sure he really had brought her home, or to some twisted image of it.

“You were supposed to fight me,” Ardyn was saying, now, petulant. “Why did you surrender?”

Wind on her face, on her closed eyes -- 

“Look at me!”

She did, and -- blood dripping into her eyes, blinding her in truth.

Ardyn’s face looming at her, faint images.

He was standing so close she could almost faint as she sensed the darkness that boiled inside him.

No -- not just darkness.

Flashes of light.

“Not possible,” she whispered.

She reached out, unthinkingly.

“What are you doing?” Ardyn asked.

She should have made contact by now, as close as he was, but her hand was passing into him -- 

“Stop that!”

She couldn’t pull away, she was caught and pinned, and she was passing through him, drawn through him -- 

One single point of light, dancing around her hand, that she pushed into her heart -- 

Aeon’s strength, Aeon’s light, rushing through her, taking shape in her hand -- a single shaft of blinding light -- 

And at the top, not a wing, but seven points in radiant purple, seven stars -- 

“Oh,” she whispered.

She turned, blindly.

She could still only feel out the shape and the proximity of Ardyn Izunia in the world, like shadows and smoke, closing in on her -- but now she wasn’t afraid as she walked into that murk, to the very heart of that old old corrupted existence -- 

Aeon light, Astral light, flowing through that black-rot heart, burning away the curse, and -- 

A man, dark-haired. 

Emaciated and pallid. 

She thought she saw the family resemblance: he almost looked like Regis.

“I am so tired.”

Gone the booming hearty unctuous voice, the overbearing manners, the scavenging leer.

She knew what to do.

“A sending,” she said.

“No.”

She blinked at the man. “No?”

“I don’t deserve that. Not that peace. I need to atone, and what you do will leave me shriven, and I will not have it. It won’t work on me.”

“So -- ”

His hands ahead of hers on the light that she still held.

Seven lights, pressed into his chest.

“Run it through,” he said. “All the way through me.”

“And?”

“And burn me away with all your power.”

“All?”

And she knew he would say, “All.”

The only way to release the Aeons. 

The only way to enforce the bargain she’d made with the Astrals.

The only way to defeat the curse of Ardyn, the curse that had haunted the Lucii through the generations.

“The last great task was yours,” the man said.

“No,” Noctis whispered, and thought of the others. “The last of the old great tasks. From now on there will be new ones. And we take them on willingly.”

The man said nothing. 

She pushed the lights in her hand into him -- slowly, agonizingly.

Like piercing stone with nothing else except her own bare hands.

Noctis screamed with the effort -- and the man’s face fell, grave and disappointed -- 

“I cannot linger any more,” he was saying, soft and yet she could hear him over her own raised cry.

“Give in!” she screamed at him. “You’re resisting it! Give in!”

Crumbling, in her hands, the lights of her strength, failing -- 

“No no no no,” Noctis cried.

“I cannot,” the man said.

“Give in,” Noctis said, and threw all her heart into the light, that blazed brighter and brighter -- 

Stumbling forward.

Here she was in the throne room.

Here was the Crystal, still existing, surrounded by the wrecked walls.

She drove her light into the heart of the Crystal -- 

The outline of the man, vanishing into the Crystal, and the outline of the Crystal, shivering around the edges.

Noctis wept, until everything flashed white, and then she knew no more.


	15. when I see the dawn

“You have done it. Done that which you were not supposed to do.”

Of all the -- 

She would have reached for the rage, and for the fierce power of her own strength, the strength that was still small and still left to her even in the wake of the Astrals, even in the wake of the Aeons -- the strength that she’d taken from all of her friends.

But she turned around and the -- being -- who was standing there, serene smile and closed eyes in an ageless face, was raising her hands in a gesture of appeasement.

“Maybe next time,” Noctis muttered, stubbornly, “if there even is a next time -- maybe don’t be such drama queens. Or cowards. Or anything that means turning a person, an entire bloodline, an entire universe, into a plaything of yours.”

“Consider, child, that we do what we do in order for this universe to continue in its existence. We would go on, and would have gone on, but we are taken from our tasks because there are mortals who seek us out, who wish to curry favor with us,” Gentiana said. “And they demand glory, they demand conquest, and these demands cause us to fall under their control.”

“Yes, okay, maybe some mortals do that, but -- you really want to lump all of us into the same categories? Because let me tell you, there is no way in any place, in any world, that you can actually do that -- that’s fucking impossible,” she argued. “All you have to do is take me for your example. I’m the person I am today, and the person that I am today is nothing like the person I was yesterday. I’m nothing like the person I was one year ago. We change. If we stop changing -- then we’re dead or worse. A little something called life.”

“And sometimes you change for the better, and sometimes for the worse.” Gentiana nodded. “If you speak of your ancestor, that one you knew as Ardyn, then -- you show wisdom, and you show understanding.”

Noctis made a face. “I don’t ever want to think about him again. He’s gone, him and the Crystal both. You’ve made it so he’s gone. So it’s really and truly gone. That’s all I want. That’s how I want it.”

“And if someone should rise to walk his path?”

Maybe Noctis was being rude, grinning the way she was. Maybe not. She had long since given up on the idea of caring about what gods and deities and immortals thought. “They’ll have a harder time, won’t they, without you to draw upon. With the Aeons set free at last.”

“Let us hope that your words will hold true.” Gentiana seemed to point to a path on the black featureless ground. “And now will you walk with me?”

Noctis tried to stay exactly where she was. “Not unless you tell me where you’re taking me. Clearly. Without any bullshit. I told you and I told you, and I’ll keep on telling you, I’ve had enough of being led around blind.”

“I do not wish to lead you blindly into this,” was the mild answer. “For this I will tell you: we are moving towards the boon that you shall have. After all, you have done that which no Summoner has ever accomplished: you have seen your great task through to the very end -- and you have survived it. You are alive. This is an event that -- will never happen again.”

“It had better not,” Noctis snapped. “That’s exactly why I did what I did. And speaking for myself, I’ve had enough of Summoners being turned into tragedies.”

“That which you have done has made it possible. We will be scattered as soul-sparks, fragmented into all living creatures. It is -- it is a good thing that you’ve done, truly. You have done, and will be doing, a great and immense kindness towards us, and we are no true targets for your kindness. Still, you have done it, and so we wish to show you our thanks.”

“I refuse!” She probably wasn’t supposed to be snapping at Gentiana -- at Shiva -- but those words were starting to grate on her. “No gifts. No, fuck no, and fuck-no-thank-you. No gifts, especially not if this gift of yours is going to come back and bite me -- bite any of my friends -- in the ass!” And she prepared to draw a weapon from within herself.

Mild smile -- did this Astral have no other expressions? -- and the soft response: “Peace, Noctis. I give you my most solemn word -- which is the word of all the Astrals, as I am their voice and their messenger. I give you our collective vow. You and yours will not be -- ah -- trifled around with from this day forth, until the end of days. You will have the peace you have all worked so hard for. All we offer you is a gift, that you may enjoy in the peace that you have earned.”

Noctis only yawned, and scowled at her. “Ugh, whatever.”

And: was it just her imagination, or did Gentiana’s smile -- did Shiva’s -- change? 

But she had no words for that almost sweet light in those eyes, when they opened, and when they focused on her.

A moment’s silence, and then the immortal only held out a hand, and in that hand was -- a bright light.

“What is this?” Noctis asked.

“Take it.”

“I don’t even know what this thing you’re trying to give me is! I don’t want it if it’s only going to hurt -- ”

But some force compelled her to hold her hand, palm down, over Gentiana’s -- and the light sparked, and flowed softly into her skin.

And when that light had winked out, Noctis collapsed.

She woke, alone, suddenly aware of being face down on carpet, on stone floors.

Something about this place was familiar: gray light of dawn pouring in, slivers of light that grew larger and brighter with each passing moment. The light that was slowly filling the room allowed her to see the rubble poised to cut her, just beyond her outstretched hand. A crumbled stone face, a crumbled stone molding, still engraved with the seal of Lucis --

“What the fuck,” she whispered, and she pushed herself up --

It didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt -- she didn’t even feel the old pang of remembered pain that used to flare up in her lower back -- it was the strangest thing, to be able to get to her feet without feeling any kind of pain at all --

Voices, calling, from outside the gallery: her name, rising and bursting forth.

But she managed to stand before they could get to where she was -- and the movement she spotted in the corner of her eye forced her to turn. Forced her to face a massive shard of blue-tinted glass, driven upright into the stone floor, somehow still capable of casting back a ghostly image of what was looking at it.

And Noctis was looking at herself in it. 

She couldn’t help but reach out to herself.

Gone the worn and stained clothes of her entire journey: her crystal-studded dress with its secret pocket. Black cloth that had worn away into gray, in the weeks and months of traveling and fighting and falling and flying. The knitted jacket that had kept her warm.

Even the tattered boots with their frayed laces were gone.

All of that was gone, washed away, like the old pains in her bones and in her sinews had been washed away.

In their place, she was dressed in something she’d only ever seen in the portraits of her ancestors, in the formal images of her father. 

She never thought that she would get the chance to wear the formal black and gold of her bloodline with all of its trappings, complete to the last detail of rich silk and heavy brocade draped against her skin.

The supple material of her dress met the crisp collars ringing her throat -- two collars, the upper one in white and the lower one in black, and she supposed she had to be wearing a little white, the better to display the pins on that upper collar: her sword and her staff, with the intricate wing details standing out. Three fine-stranded chains, two in bronze-colored metal and one in white, connected the pins.

Down, her eyes moved down of their own accord: here were the long sleeves of her dress, ending in double cuffs. White over black as with her collar, and the cufflinks on the crisp white bore the insignia of the Lucii bloodline. 

The black silk skimmed her body and stopped just above her knees in soft loose pleats. 

Gold-festooned belts wrapped around her waist, and on the broadest one was her knife, the plain one, the much-used one, though the scabbard was new and intricately chased.

She saw the long cape that fell from her own shoulders to the tops of her boots, and wondered if there was anything embroidered onto the back. 

The boots covered her calves, and she couldn’t help but stand up a little straighter, grateful for the precious few inches the low heels granted her. 

The echoes were rising around her, were coming closer.

She turned away from the glass, and thought of the light that Shiva, and the rest of the Astrals, had passed on to her.

And as if in response, something sparked in her left hand -- she raised it to get a good look, and found herself looking at a crown.

But was it really a crown? Why would the Astrals, in their departure, give her something so -- plain and simple? 

Simple indeed: all it was, was a circlet of gold decorated with a device of a half-risen sun, resplendent with its rays.

Nothing at all like her father’s crown, the crown that all of her ancestors had worn, the silver branch of the Lucii.

She was only broken from her contemplation of the crown when the door opposite her burst open: and every one of them who ran pell-mell down the corridor towards her in was dressed in black -- she even recognized the cords and the braids.

They were wearing the black of the Kingsglaive’s formal coats.

Well, every one of them, except for Luna, and for Ravus: they were wearing the high whites and blues of Tenebrae, and Noctis wondered, fleetingly, where they had gotten them.

“You guys,” she said, and she started forward, and held out her other hand, the hand that wasn’t carrying the crown --

And she stopped dead again.

She was still wearing a ring on the third finger of her right hand, but this ring was not black.

She’d never seen the Ring of the Lucii rendered in gold, or -- for that matter -- shorn of the crystal that it had carried from the very first moment she’d become aware of it, the crystal that it had carried from the very beginning of her bloodline. 

It didn’t seem right, to see those six-sided shapes on the band in gold, to see the empty bezel.

But there it was on her finger, gently warming against her skin: nothing at all to cause her grief or fear.

As she stared at them, she realized, slowly, that they were staring at her too.

Except for Prompto and for Luna, who were standing at the front of the group, arguing in whispers -- she saw the agitated movement of Prompto’s gloved hands, and the stubborn set of Luna’s shoulders.

“Guys,” she said, making a face at them. 

Neither of them paid her any heed, and the discussion only ended when Luna stuck her tongue out at Prompto, who sighed, and moved forward, and -- damn him -- stopped an arm’s length away. 

“I’ll take that,” he said, and carefully relieved her of the crown, cradling it to his chest, as though it were a chocobo egg, or a just-hatched chocochick. “She said so.”

“Guys,” Noctis said, again, and she heard the exasperated note in her own voice.

Ignis and Gladio next to each other, arms linked. Aranea and Ravus and Umbra, all looking solemn.

And here was Luna, smiling, and there was a flash of light and she was holding a new trident -- a plain one without any kind of identifying insignia, just three spear-heads set atop a plain wooden shaft -- in her hands once again. “Noctis,” she said. “Will you please get on your knees?”

Noctis stared at her for a very long moment, trying to understand -- “Luna. What the actual fuck?” Pause, as she tried to take in the way Prompto was standing, out and up from his usual easy slouch. The proud line of Luna’s mouth. The crown, waiting for her; the trident, pointed in her direction. 

“Wait, no, are you fucking with me?” she asked. “You want to do this now?”

“No better time for a coronation, if you ask me,” Luna said, with her implacable smile. “You are here. The crown is here. The witnesses are all here. The sun is rising. The night is over. What else did you want? Who else should be here?”

And she had no real answer to that question: she was not going to ask the refugees to come home, not when Insomnia was still reeling and in ruins.

Those whom she would have wanted to stand with her now, aside from these friends already present: they could not be here.

And Luna was right: the sun was rising. 

So Noctis took a deep breath, and fell to one knee on the cracked floor, and bowed her head.

The kiss of the trident on her shoulders, left and then right.

Luna’s voice, sweet and carrying and rich. “Noctis Lastella. Last Crown Princess of the Lucii. Summoner Noctis. Through your trials you have passed, and the sun rises because of what you have done and what you have been through. The sun rises and sees you at the completion of your great task. So we give you your crown and your glory.”

Noctis felt the wry twist in her own smile. “You’re really that determined to do all this when I don’t even have a throne.” Still with her head bowed, she hooked her thumb over her shoulder, pointing at the tallest dais. 

There, buried in shattered rock -- the shards of the Crystal were gone -- was her father’s throne, and all she had seen of it were the arms that jutted forward, somehow still barely holding together under the debris, under the rubble.

She blinked when she heard Luna laugh, softly. “I don’t know why you’re talking about that throne. If I know you, and I think I know you a little, you’ll leave it to gather dust. You won’t even be here to sit down on it. Things to do, right? Things to care for. You still have your road ahead of you. You still have your people to guide onto your road, and onto theirs, whatever they choose from now on.”

She looked up, shocked.

Saw the light in Luna’s eyes, like respect, like a challenge, like the good kind of expectations.

She gave in, then.

Glanced at Prompto, who lifted her crown in his hands, who held it as gently as he had held her, during the long nights. 

And she nodded, and beckoned him forward.

She knew what to say.

She knew what the last boon was.

Her life and its continuation was only incidental to the boon that she had been granted.

And this was the boon: the road before her. The road that was still laid at her feet. The road that she would still need to keep following.

And she met the eyes of every one there.

Said, out loud, “I will take the crown. I will take my road. I will walk tall. Glory is not for me: the work is not yet done. So I will go on.”

“But from this moment you will go as one crowned in light, as the one who brought back the light,” Luna said.

Noctis watched her turn in Prompto’s direction. “Gently, now.”

And she smiled up at him as he stood over her, with tears shining brilliant in his eyes.

She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. Off the crown that he was lowering very carefully onto her head. 

She felt his fingertips brushing her forehead, adjusting the crown, so the sun emblazoned in gold settled exactly between her eyebrows.

“I am the Oracle,” Luna said, in a ringing voice. “And with my power and my authority and this crown, I proclaim you Noctis Lastella. Queen of Lucis. Queen of Light. Chosen Queen. From now on, you continue on your road, with your power shining forth in the rays of the sun. From now on, you lead us, in light and in life.”

Noctis, trembling, rose to her feet.

And held her hands out: one to Luna, one to Prompto.

“I am Queen, but I will not be alone,” she said, and that was the trick of this place that still worked despite its ruins, that she could speak quietly and yet still be heard, clarion and clear. “I will walk my road, but I will not walk it alone. We’ll walk this road together, all of us. The road is ours. It belongs to every one of us.”

“Well said!” Aranea cried, clapping her hands.

Gladio let out a wild triumphant whoop. 

Luna laughed, and nodded, and squeezed her hand. Said, “Then let me speak for Tenebrae. We will walk with you, Queen Noctis. We will take the road you have marked for us.”

Ravus stepped forward, and bowed, solemn with his scars and his shorn hair and the black frame of his mechanical arm. “Let me speak for Niflheim. We will walk with you, Queen Noctis. We will take the road you have marked for us.”

“And let me speak for Lucis,” Ignis said, his fist clenched over his chest, and tears falling into the corners of his smile. “You are our Queen, Noctis, the Queen we have long awaited. We will walk with you. We will take the road you have marked for us.”

Umbra just flashed her a wide lupine grin, the sunlight flashing on his sharp canines.

That left --

Luna was smiling, and relinquishing her hand, and stepping away.

That left Prompto.

“I don’t speak for anyone else except myself,” he was saying, softly, as she tried to smile at him. “I don’t belong to anyone or to anywhere except -- except to you. You are the place where I live. You are the home I have always looked for. You are the person I pledged myself to. I will still make that pledge to you, and that pledge will be yours and yours alone. Only name the time and place -- Noctis. My Queen.”

“Prompto,” she said, as his tears fell at last. 

She closed the space between them. “This is not a command, royal or friendly or anything else,” she said, as she pulled him close, as she raised his hands so that she could place both of them over her heart. “This is just me, asking you: will you marry me?”

“Yes!” he cried -- and she all but leaped into his arms, into his joyous kiss.

Dimly she was aware of the others laughing and cheering them on -- dimly she was aware of Gladio and Aranea, calling out an off-color suggestion or two.

She kissed Prompto until her very breath was gone, drinking in the salt on his mouth.

And he let her go -- but before she could complain, or ask for another kiss, he was laughing and catching her up, and the echoes of him were rising in the gallery, as he whirled her around and around, until she was smiling so much her face was starting to hurt, held fast in his arms once again.

But that meant that she was facing the throne when she stopped moving, looking at the wreck of it from around the line of his shoulder: and in the true light of the sun that had risen at long last, she saw him, standing atop the dais.

A suit, a cape, a cane.

A face free of pain. 

A proud smile, and his tears falling.

Her father.

He did not linger, not even long enough for her to reach silently out to him -- but when he vanished, the image that appeared in his place was just as welcome. 

A man in blacks and golds, much the same as hers: a golden brace clasped around his knee, a cape that fell to his knees, a formal jacket with the seal of Lucis on a large golden shield on his shoulder. He was much younger than Regis; he was much wearier; he was bowed down by far more than ten years of pain and waiting -- but he, too, was smiling proudly.

He was holding up a hand to her, and on that hand glittered a black ring, inset with a dull crystal.

She let her own tears flow, then, and smiled at him as he faded away.

She hoped he and his Eos were at peace.

It was a peace she’d have to rebuild, here on her Eos.

But she wouldn’t have to do it alone.

They were all here, and they were all still at her side. 

Here, at the end of the night.

Here, at the beginning of the day.

**Author's Note:**

> And that concludes the main storyline of this summoner AU -- but please check out the various side stories!
> 
> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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